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On the nature of morphological awareness in Japanese–English bilingual children: A cross-linguistic perspective*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2012

YUKO HAYASHI  and
VICTORIA A. MURPHY
YUKO HAYASHI*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
VICTORIA A. MURPHY
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
Address for correspondence: Yuko Hayashi, 15 Norham Gardens, Oxford OX2 6PY, UK[email protected]
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Abstract

While morphological awareness has received much attention to date, little is understood about how morphological awareness develops within bilingual children learning typologically different languages. Therefore, we investigated children's knowledge of inflections and derivations in Japanese and English, and also asked whether morphological awareness in one language predicted morphological awareness in the other. To that end, 24 Japanese learners of L2 English (ESL) and 21 English learners of Japanese as a heritage language (JHL) were recruited and participated in a range of tasks assessing both vocabulary and morphological knowledge. Cross-linguistic contributions of morphological awareness were identified in both directions (Japanese ↔ English), after controlling for age, IQ, and vocabulary knowledge. This bidirectional transfer was, however, identified only in the ESL group. The group-specific and reciprocal transfer observed is discussed in terms of morphological complexities and relative competence in each language. The potential role of different types of L2 instruction in morphological development is also discussed.

Keywords

morphological awarenessbilingualismmorphological transfermulticompetence
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 49 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

The study is part of a larger-scale research project funded by the Japan Students Organisation Service (Grant No. L 09172010001). We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the participating children for their hard work in the testing sessions and to their parents and teachers for their continued support and encouragement. We are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and Lars-Erik Malmberg for statistical support. Special thanks are also extended to Mairéad McKendry for her assistance with the testing. The first author would also like to thank Hiroshi Ono, Shoichi Tanaka and Matthew Clarke for their stimulating discussions and valuable encouragement throughout the study.

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