Cross-linguistic transfer between aspect in Cantonese and past tense in English in Cantonese-English bilingual preschool children

Abstract

Purpose: This study addresses the question of whether sequential bilingual children’s past tense marking development in their second language (L2) is affected by their knowledge of temporal marking in their first language (L1). We investigated whether Cantonese-English sequential bilingual children’s knowledge of aspect markers in Cantonese (L1), along with external and internal factors, predicts their past tense marking in English (L2).

Method: We examined 39 pre-school children’s production of perfective aspect markers in Cantonese and regular and irregular past tense morphemes in English using a story-retell task administered in both languages.

Result: The results showed that children produced significantly more irregular past tense verbs than regular past tense verbs in English. Their English irregular past tense use, but not regular past tense use, was predicted by their knowledge of aspect markers in Cantonese.

Conclusion: Findings suggest that semantic transfer between Cantonese and English might contribute to the early stages of acquiring English past tense marking. Clinically, the results could potentially lead to more informed assessment procedures and better diagnostic decision making for bilingual children.

Keywords:

• bilingual
• Cantonese
• morphological development
• aspect marker
• past tense

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our research assistants Lin Ye and Asling Ye for their help with transcribing the language samples. We thank the teachers and staff at the Kai Ming Head Start for their support in coordinating testing and the children and their families for their participation.

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2021.1981445.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Centre to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences and the Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant awarded to Shirley Huang by the University of Colorado Boulder. The work was also supported by a Faculty Fellowship Award awarded to Pui Fong Kan by the Implementation of Multicultural Perspectives and Approaches in Research and Teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder.