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Do early successive bilinguals show the English L2 pattern of precocious BE acquisition?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2015

JOHANNE PARADIS  and
ELMA BLOM
JOHANNE PARADIS*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
ELMA BLOM
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
*
Address for correspondence: Professor Johanne Paradis, Department of Linguistics, 4–57 Assiniboia Hall, University of Alberta, Edmonton, ABCanada, T6G 2E7[email protected]
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Abstract

This study investigated the role of age-of-acquisition in determining whether young bilingual children show a pattern of L2/nonnative English, precocious BE acquisition, or whether they show the L1/native English pattern of synchronous acquisition of BE and inflectional morphology. Two groups of children with age-of-acquisition before or after 4;0 and equivalent exposure to L2 English were given production and grammaticality-judgement tasks. The children in both age-of-acquisition groups showed the precocious BE pattern, regardless of L1 background and on both tasks. We conclude that, for this aspect of morphosyntax, bilingual children who begin to learn English after age 3;0 are best characterized as child L2 rather than bilingual L1 learners.

Keywords

bilingual acquisitionchild second language acquisitionage of acquisitionEnglish morphology
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 630 - 635
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank the following research assistants for their help in collecting and processing the data: Kyla Coole, Kristyn Emmerzael, Ruiting Jia, Katryna Lysay, Dorothy Pinto, Tamara Sorenson Duncan, Emily Yiu, and Tatiana Zdorenko. We would also like to thank the Multicultural Health Brokers Cooperative and the Edmonton Public School Board for assistance in recruitment. This research was supported with funds from the following agencies: The Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network (Award #27061500 to Paradis), the Alberta Centre for Child, Family and Community Research (Award #090415INV to Paradis) and Alberta Innovates Health Solutions (Health Scholar Award to Paradis).

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