Production of tense marking in successive bilingual children: When do they converge with their monolingual peers?

Abstract

Children with English as a second language (L2) with exposure of 18 months or less exhibit similar difficulties to children with Specific Language Impairment in tense marking, a marker of language impairment for English. This paper examines whether L2 children with longer exposure converge with their monolingual peers in the production of tense marking. Thirty-eight successive bilingual Turkish-English speaking (L2) children with a mean age of 7;8 and 33 monolingual English-speaking (L1) age-matched controls completed the screening test of the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI). The L2 children as a group were as accurate as the controls in the production of -ed, but performed significantly lower than the controls in the production of third person –s. Age and years of exposure (YoE) affected the children's performance. The highest age-expected performance on the TEGI was attested in 8- and 9-year-old children who had 4–6 YoE. L1 and L2 children performed better in regular compared to irregular verbs, but L2 children overregularized more than L1 children and were less sensitive to the phonological properties of verbs. The results show that tense marking and the screening test of the TEGI may be promising for differential diagnosis in 8- and 9-year-old L2 children with at least four YoE.

Keywords:

• Bilingualism
• morphosyntax
• language impairment

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council research grant ‘Real-time processing of syntactic information in children with English as a Second Language and children with Specific Language Impairment’ awarded to Theo Marinis (RES-061-23-0137). We would like to thank Halit Firat for collecting the data from the L2 children, the schools and families for participating in this project, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Note

1. This child had age of onset 5;0.

2. It should be noted that although the CELEX database includes spoken language, it consists predominantly of written texts. Therefore, we fully agree with one of the reviewers that the frequencies should be treated with caution in terms of how representative they might be of what children of this age are exposed to.