Morphological generalization in bilingual language production: Age of acquisition determines variability

Figures & data

Table 1. Percentages of -t and -n participle overapplications in bilingual corpus data

	Age (at recording)	L1	AoA (German)	-t overapps	-n overapps
Faruk^a	3;01–4;09	Turkish	2;09	15.6%	0.6%
Eser^a	3;09–5;06	Turkish	3;00	7.0%	1.3%
Zeren^a	3;03–5;07	Turkish	3;00	42.9%	2.2%
Gül^a	3;01–5;06	Turkish	3;00	9.6%	1.3%
Hande^a	4;02–4;11	Turkish	3;04	12.5%	5.9%
Fikret^a	4;11–5;06	Turkish	4;02	6.4%	0%
Meral^a	5;02–5;09	Turkish	4;04	3.9%	0%
Ewa^b	2;08–3;08	Polish	2;06	26.9%	2.7%
Witek^b	4;01–5;01	Polish	3;08	2.2%	2.4%
Adam^b	4;03–6;01	Polish	4;00	11.9%	2.0%
Jan^b	4;10–5;08	Polish	4;07	7.3%	0%

^aSterner (2017:246): Tables 10–19.

^bSopata (2013:156): Table 2.

Table 2. Percentages of -t and -n participle responses with and without stem change by Condition and Group

	IRREGULAR		IRREG/REG		REGULAR		NO-SIMILARITY
	CTR	BIL	CTR	BIL	CTR	BIL	CTR	BIL
-n [stem]	1.15	17.75	1.68	12.52	7.25	21.98	4.09	19.20
-n [stem change]	38.78	30.83	27.07	18.39	6.40	4.63	4.40	5.50
-t [stem]	57.55	49.38	67.89	65.76	84.65	71.05	88.89	73.40
-t [stem change]	2.52	2.04	3.36	3.33	1.70	2.34	2.62	1.90

Table 3. Fixed effects from the model for -t (vs. -n) participle suffixation

	Estimate	SE	z
(Intercept)	3.29	0.30	10.93
Group (BIL vs. MON)	–1.24	0.5	–2.51
Condition (Reg vs. No Sim)	–0.5	0.2	–2.3
Condition (Irreg/Reg vs. No Sim)	–0.98	0.3	–3.88
Condition (Irreg vs. No Sim)	–2.23	0.2	–9.2
Group (BIL vs. MON) × Condition (Irreg/Reg vs. No Sim)	1.85	0.5	4.09
Group (BIL vs. MON) × Condition (Irreg vs. No Sim)	1.58	0.46	3.44
Group (BIL vs. MON) × Condition (Reg vs. No Sim)	0.70	0.43	1.66

Formula in R: glmer(Suffix ~ Condition × Group + Form presented + (1 + Condition + Form presented|participant) + (1 + Group|trial), control = glmerControl(optimizer = “bobyqa”), data.

Table 4. Fixed effects from the model for participles with (vs. without) stem changes

	Estimate	SE	z
(Intercept)	–4.44	0.34	–13.04
Group	–0.77	0.5	–1.59
Condition (Irreg vs. No Sim)	3.0	0.3	9.7
Condition (Irreg/Reg vs. No Sim)	2.1	0.3	6.6
Condition (Reg vs. No Sim)	–0.3	0.3	–0.8
Group (BIL vs. MON) × Condition (Irreg vs. No Sim)	–0.7	0.6	–1.3
Group (BIL vs. MON) × Condition (Irreg/Reg vs. No Sim)	–0.89	0.6	–1.74
Group (BIL vs. MON) × Condition (Reg vs. No Sim)	0.04	0.5	0.08

Formula in R: glmer(Stem Change~Condition × Group + (1 + Condition|participant) + (1 + Group|trial), control = glmerControl(optimizer = “bobyqa”), data.

Figure 1. Density plots for -t participles (BIL: dotted line, CTR: straight line)

Figure 2. Density plots for participles with stem changes (BIL: dotted line, CTR: straight line)

Table 5. Correlation coefficients (r) between participant-level variables

	Age of acquisition	TELC score	Use of German	Length of exposure
Telc score	–0.43
Use of German	–0.18	0.17
Length of exposure	–0.41	0.22	0.00
LexTale score	–0.43	0.51	0.15	0.39

Figure 3. AoA by proportion of -t participles in the two participant groups: black straight line = BIL group, gray shadow = confidence intervals BIL; black dash-dotted line = model estimate for CTR group across the four conditions (=0.92), black dotted lines = confidence intervals CTR group (lower = 0.84; upper = 0.96)

Sterner, Franziska. 2017. Sukzessiv-bilinguale Kinder: Der Erwerb von Partizipien in der frühen Zweitsprache Deutsch. Hamburg: University of Hamburg dissertation.

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Sopata, Aldona. 2013. Einblick in das mentale Lexikon–Partizipien II im frühen Erwerb des Deutschen. Zeitschrift des Verbandes Polnischer Germanisten/Czasopismo Stowarzyszenia Germanistów Polskich (ZVPG) 2. 151–159.

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