Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T08:47:27.541Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Acquiring complex structures under minority language conditions: Bilingual acquisition of plural morphology in Welsh*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2013

ENLLI MÔN THOMAS ,
NIA WILLIAMS ,
LLINOS ANGHARAD JONES ,
SUSI DAVIES  and
HANNA BINKS
ENLLI MÔN THOMAS*
Affiliation:
College of Business, Law, Education and Social Sciences, Bangor University & ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice
NIA WILLIAMS
Affiliation:
College of Business, Law, Education and Social Sciences, Bangor University
LLINOS ANGHARAD JONES
Affiliation:
College of Business, Law, Education and Social Sciences, Bangor University
SUSI DAVIES
Affiliation:
ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice
HANNA BINKS
Affiliation:
College of Business, Law, Education and Social Sciences, Bangor University
*
Address for correspondence: Enlli Môn Thomas, School of Education, Bangor University, Normal Site, Holyhead Road, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2PZ, UK[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study explored the effects of quantity and quality of input on bilingual children's acquisition of complex plural morphology in Welsh. Study 1 explored the quality of adult input and revealed target-like marking of plural forms in naturalistic adult speech. Study 2 presented eighty-eight 7–11-year-old children, across three bilingual language groups (L1 Welsh, 2L1, and L2 Welsh), with a plural production task. Results revealed performances approaching L1 adult norms among L1 Welsh-speaking bilinguals, but delayed progression among 2L1 and L2 Welsh bilinguals, although analyses of errors revealed various levels of structural knowledge. Forms requiring the addition of a plural suffix were less difficult to acquire than those involving alterations to the root, with each type acquired with greater levels of accuracy with increasing levels of exposure to the language. The implications of these findings for our understanding of bilingual acquisition of complex structures under minority language conditions are discussed.

Keywords

inputWelshbilingualplural morphologyminority language
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 478 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Part of this work was funded by a Development Fund Grant from the ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice. We wish to express our sincere gratitude to all participating schools for their kindness and time, and all parents and children who took part in the research. We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

References

Ball, M. J., & Müller, N. (1992). Mutation in Welsh. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, andcognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E., & Luk, G. (2012). Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual adults. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 397–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bianchi, G. (2013). Gender in Italian–German bilinguals: A comparison with German L2 learners of Italian. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 538–557.Google Scholar
Blom, E. (2010). Effects of input on the early grammatical development of bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 14, 422–446.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. (2001). Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Census (2001). Office for National Statistics: Welsh language profile. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/search/index.html?newquery=language.Google Scholar
Chondrioganni, V., & Marinis, T. (2011). Differential effects of internal and external factors on the development of vocabulary, tense morphology and morpho-syntax in successive bilingual children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 318–345.Google Scholar
Cobo-Lewis, A., Pearson, B., Eilers, R., & Umbel, V. (2002a). Effects ofbilingualism and bilingual education on oral and written Spanish skills: A multifactor study of standardized test outcomes. In Oller & Eilers (eds.), pp. 98–117.Google Scholar
Cobo-Lewis, A., Pearson, B., Eilers, R., & Umbel, V. (2002b). Effects of bilingualism and bilingual education on oral and written English skills: A multifactor study of standardized test outcomes. In Oller & Eilers (eds.), pp. 64–97.Google Scholar
Cohen, J., McAlister, K., Rolstad, K., & MacSwan, J. (eds.) (2005). ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Deuchar, M., & Davies, P. (2009). Code switching and the future of the Welsh language. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 195, 15–38.Google Scholar
Döpke, S. (1988). The role of parental teaching techniques in bilingual German–English families. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 72, 101–112.Google Scholar
Döpke, S. (1992). One parent – one language: An interactional approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Ellis, N. C., O'Dochartaigh, C., Hicks, W., Morgan, M., & Laporte, N. (2001). CronfaElectroneg o Gymraeg/A 1 million word lexical database and frequency count for Welsh. Bangor: University of Wales Bangor, School of Psychology. http://www.bangor.ac.uk/ar/cb/ceg/ceg_cym.html.Google Scholar
Elman, J. L. (2001). Connectionism and language acquisition. In Tomasello, M. & Bates, E. (eds.), Language development: The essential readings, pp. 295–306. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Elman, J. L., Bates, E. A., Johnson, M. H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., & Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M. (1986). The acquisition of the present perfect: Explaining differences in the speech of Scottish and American children. Journal of Child Language, 13, 537–560.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M. (2002a). Command of the mass/count distinction in bilingual and monolingual children: An English morphosyntactic distinction. In Oller & Eilers (eds.), pp. 175–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M. (2002b). Grammatical gender in bilingual and monolingual children: A Spanish morphosyntactic distinction. In Oller & Eilers (eds.), pp. 207–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M. (2002c). Monolingual and bilingual acquisition: Learning different treatments of that–trace phenomena in English and Spanish. In Oller & Eilers (eds.), pp. 220–254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M. (2007a). Miami and North Wales, so far and yet so near: Constructivist account of morpho-syntactic development in bilingual children. The International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 10, 224–247.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M. (ed.) (2007b). Language transmission in bilingual families in Wales. Cardiff: Welsh Language Board Consultation Document.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M., & Hoff, E. (2007). Input and the acquisition of language: Three questions. In Hoff, E. & Shatz, M. (eds.), Blackwell handbook of language development, pp. 107–127. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M., Laporte, N., & Thomas, E. M. (2005). Differentiation, carry- over, and the distributed characteristic in bilinguals: Structural ‘mixing’ of the two languages? In Cohen et al. (eds.), pp. 838–851.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M[ueller]., & Sebastián, E., & Soto, P. (1999). The early acquisition of Spanish verbal morphology: Across-the-board or piecemeal knowledge? International Journal of Bilingualism, 3, 133–182.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M., & Thomas, E. M. (2005). Minority language survival: Input factors influencing the acquisition of Welsh. In Cohen et al. (eds.), pp. 852–874.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M., & Thomas, E. M. (2009). Bilingual first-language development: Dominant language takeover, threatened minority language take-up. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 213–238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M., Thomas, E. M., & Hughes, E. (2008). Designing a normed receptive vocabulary test for bilingual populations: A model from Welsh. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 11, 678–720.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M., Thomas, E. M., & Laporte, N. I. (2001). The acquisition of grammatical gender in Welsh. Journal of Celtic Language Learning, 6, 53–87.Google Scholar
Goldberg, H., Paradis, J., & Crago, M. (2008). Lexical acquisition over time in minority first language children learning English as a second language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 41–65.Google Scholar
Griffiths, B., & Jones, D. G. (1995). Geiriadur yr Academi. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.Google Scholar
Hart, B., & Risley, T. (1995). Meaningful differences in everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Paul Brookes Publishing Co.Google Scholar
Hoff, E. (2003). The specificity of environmental influence: Socioeconomic status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech. Child Development, 74, 1368–1378.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoff, E., & Elledge, C. (2005). Bilingualism as one of many environmental variables that affect language development. In Cohen et al. (eds.), pp. 1034–1040.Google Scholar
Hulk, A. J., & Cornips, L. (2006). The acquisition of definite determiners in child L2 Dutch: Problems with neuter gender nouns. In Unsworth, S., Parodi, T., Sorace, A. & Young-Scholten, M. (eds.), Paths of development in L1 and L2 Acquisition, pp. 107–134. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
King, G. (1993). Modern Welsh: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kupisch, T. (2012). Specific and generic subjects in the Italian of German–Italian simultaneous bilinguals and L2 learners. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 736–756.Google Scholar
Lanza, E. (1997). Language mixing in infant bilingualism: A sociolinguistic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Children's first language acquisition from a usage-based perspective. In Robinson, P. & Ellis, N. C. (eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition, pp. 216–236. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd edn.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Maratsos, M. P. (2000). More overregularizations after all: New data and discussion on Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen & Xu. Journal of Child Language, 27, 183–212.Google Scholar
Marchman, V. A., & Bates, E. (1994). Continuity in lexical and morphological development: A test of the critical mass hypothesis. Journal of Child Language, 21, 339–365.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Montrul, S. (2008). Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism: Re-examining the age-factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Morris, D. (ed.) (2010). Welsh in the twenty-first century. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.Google Scholar
Nicoladis, E. (2006). Cross-linguistic transfer in adjective–noun strings by preschool bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9, 15–32.Google Scholar
Nicoladis, E., Crago, M., & Genesee, F. (2010). Bilingual children's acquisition of the past tense: A usage-based approach. Journal of Child Language, 37, 1–25.Google Scholar
Oller, D. K., & Eilers, R. E. (eds.) (2002). Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2010). Bilingual children's acquisition of English verb morphology: Effects of language exposure, structure complexity, and task type. Language Learning, 60, 651–680.Google Scholar
Paradis, J., & Navarro, S. (2003). Subject realization and crosslinguistic interference in the bilingual acquisition of Spanish and English: What is the role of the input? Journal of Child Language, 30, 371–393.Google Scholar
Paradis, J., Nicoladis, E., & Crago, M. (2007). French–English bilingual children's acquisition of the past tense. In Caunt-Nulton, H., Kulatilake, S. & Woo, I.-H. (eds.), BUCLD 31, pp. 497–507. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, S. C., Lewedeg, V., & Oller, D. K. (1997). The relation of input factors to lexical learning by bilingual infants. Applied Psycholinguistics, 18, 41–58.Google Scholar
Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, S. [C.], & Oller, D. K. (1993). Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norms. Language Learning, 43, 93–120.Google Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Pirvulescu, M., & Roberge, Y. (2009). Bilingualism as a window into the language faculty: The acquisition of objects in French-speaking children in bilingual and monolingual contexts. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 97–112.Google Scholar
Place, S., & Hoff, E. (2011). Properties of dual language exposure that influence two-year-olds’ bilingual proficiency. Child Development, 82, 1834–1849.Google Scholar
Polinsky, M. (1997). American Russian: Language loss meets language acquisition. In Browne, W. (ed.), Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics, Cornell Meeting (1995), pp. 370–406. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications.Google Scholar
Polinsky, M. (2008). Gender under incomplete acquisition: Heritage speakers’ knowledge of noun categorization. Heritage Language Journal, 6, 40–71.Google Scholar
Raven, J., Raven, J. C., & Court, J. H. (1998). Standard Progressive Matrices: 1998 Edition. Oxford: Oxford Psychologists Press.Google Scholar
Rhys, M., & Thomas, E. M. (2013). Bilingual Welsh–English children's acquisition of vocabulary and reading: Implications for bilingual education. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16, 633–656.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, S. H., & Gathercole, V. C. M. (2006). Categorizing collections of objects: Linguistic and cognitive factors influencing Welsh and English speakers’ judgements. First Language, 26, 161–185.Google Scholar
Thomas, E. M. (2001). Aspects of gender mutation in Welsh. Ph.D. dissertation, Bangor University.Google Scholar
Thomas, E. M., & Gathercole, V. C. M. (2005). Obsolescence or survival for Welsh in the face of English dominance? In Cohen et al. (eds.), pp. 2233–2257.Google Scholar
Thomas, E. M., & Gathercole, V. C. M. (2007). Children's productive command of grammatical gender and mutation in Welsh: An alternative to rule-based learning. First Language, 27, 251–278.Google Scholar
Thomas, E. M., Lewis, W. G., & Apolloni, D. (2012). Variation in language choice in extended speech in primary schools in Wales: Implications for teacher education. Language and Education, 26, 245–261.Google Scholar
Thomas, E. M., & Mayr, R. (2010). Children's acquisition of Welsh in a bilingual setting: A psycholinguistic perspective. In Morris (ed.), pp. 99–117.Google Scholar
Thomas, E. M., & Roberts, D. B. (2011). Exploring bilinguals’ social use of Welsh inside and out of the minority language classroom. Language and Education, 25, 89–108.Google Scholar
Thomas, P. W. (1996). Gramadeg y Gymraeg. Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru.Google Scholar
Thordardottir, E., Rothenberg, A., Rivard, M. E., & Naves, R. (2006). Bilingual assessment: Can overall proficiency be estimated from separate measurement of two languages? Journal of Multilingual Communication Disorders, 4, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorne, D. (1993). A comprehensive Welsh grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press.Google Scholar
Umbel, V. C., Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, M. C., & Oller, D. K. (1992). Measuring bilingual children's receptive vocabularies. Child Development, 63, 1012–1020.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S. (2013). Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16, 86–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weizman, Z. O., & Snow, C. E. (2001). Lexical input as related to children's vocabulary acquisition: Effects of sophisticated exposure and support for meaning. Developmental Psychology, 37, 265–279.Google Scholar
Welsh Government (2012). 2011 Census: First results on the Welsh language (Statistical Bulletin – Bwletin Ystadegol: Knowledge and Analytical Services). Cardiff: Welsh Government.Google Scholar