Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T18:36:57.576Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Vulnerability of clitics and articles to bilingual effects in typically developing Spanish–English bilingual children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2019

Anny Castilla-Earls ,
Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux ,
Lourdes Martinez-Nieto ,
Maria Adelaida Restrepo  and
Christopher Barr
Anny Castilla-Earls*
Affiliation:
University of Houston
Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Lourdes Martinez-Nieto
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
Maria Adelaida Restrepo
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
Christopher Barr
Affiliation:
University of Houston
*
Address for correspondence: Anny Castilla-Earls 4455 Cullen Blvd Room 100 University of HoustonHoustonTX77204, E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examines bilingual effects in Spanish–English bilingual children with good maintenance of the minority language. The present study compares the performance of a group of Spanish-monolingual children (MON; n = 30) with two groups of Spanish-speaking bilingual children (Low English proficiency group: LEP; n = 36; High English proficiency group, HEP; n = 36) on the elicited productions of Spanish articles and object clitics. Our results suggest that children with LEP performed significantly lower than MON children of the same age on both articles and clitics in Spanish. However, children with HEP, who were a year older on average, performed similarly to the MON group. Both groups of bilingual children produced errors of clitic omission and substitution, but these errors were minimal in the MON group. The results suggest that Spanish clitics and articles are vulnerable to bilingual effects for English/Spanish speaking children with good Spanish maintenance.

Keywords

articlesclitic pronounsSpanish
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 23 , Special Issue 4: Interpreting: A window into bilingual processing , August 2020 , pp. 825 - 835
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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.)

References

Aguirre, C (2000) La adquisición de las categorías gramaticales en español. Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de MadridGoogle Scholar
Alba, R, Logan, J, Lutz, A and Stults, B (2002) Only English by the third generation? Loss and preservation of the mother tongue among the grandchildren of contemporary immigrants. Demography 39, 467–484.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alba, R (2004) Language Assimilation Today: Bilingualism Persists More Than in the Past, but English Still Dominates. Center for Comparative Immigration Studies. UC San Diego: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0j5865nkGoogle Scholar
Anderson, R and Souto, S (2005) The use of articles by monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Applied Linguistics 26, 621–647.Google Scholar
Barreña, A (1997) Desarrollo diferenciado de sistemas gramaticales en un niño vasco-español bilingüe. In Pérez-Leroux, A and Glass, W (eds), Contemporary perspectives on the acquisition of Spanish. Volume 1: Developing grammars. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, pp. 55–74.Google Scholar
Bedore, LM and Leonard, LB (2001) Grammatical morphology deficits in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 44, 905–924.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bedore, LM and Leonard, LB (2005) Verb inflections and noun phrase morphology in the spontaneous speech of Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 26, 195–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Camacho, J (2017) Introducción a la sintaxis del español. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Castilla, A (2008) Morphosyntactic acquisition in monolingual 3-, 4- and 5-year-old Spanish-speaking children (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Toronto.Google Scholar
Castilla, AP and Pérez-Leroux, AT (2010) Omissions and substitutions in Spanish object clitics: Developmental optionality as a property of the representational system. Language Acquisition 17, 2–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Castilla-Earls, AP, Restrepo, MA, Perez-Leroux, AT, Gray, S, Holmes, P, Gail, D and Chen, Z (2016) Interactions between bilingual effects and language impairment: Exploring grammatical markers in Spanish-speaking bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics 37, 1147–1173. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0142716415000521CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Costa, J, Lobo, M and Pratas, F (2016) Clitic production by Portuguese and Cape Verdean children: Omission in bilingualism. Probus 28, 271–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cuza, A and Pérez-Tattam, R (2016) Grammatical gender selection and phrasal word order in child heritage Spanish: A feature re-assembly approach. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19, 50–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dawson, JI, Stout, CE and Eyer, JA (2003) Structured photographic expressive language test: Third edition. DeKalb, IL: Janelle Publications.Google Scholar
De la Mora, J, Paradis, J, Grinstead, J, Flores, B and Cantu, M (2004). Object clitics in Spanish-speaking children with and without SLI. Poster session presented at the 25th Annual Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison.Google Scholar
Eichler, N, Jansen, V and Müller, N (2013) Gender acquisition in bilingual children: French–German, Italian–German, Spanish–German and Italian–French. International journal of bilingualism 17, 550–572.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elliott, M (2016) Direct and indirect object omission in the Spanish of monolingual and bilingual Spanish-French children: Exploring symmetries/asymmetries. Talk presented at the 2016 Canadian Linguistics Association Annual Conference, Calgary, AB.Google Scholar
Fillmore, L (1991) When learning a second language means losing the first. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 6(3), 323–346.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, VCM (2002) Grammatical gender in bilingual and monolingual children: A Spanish morphosyntactic distinction. In Oller, DK and Eilers, R (eds), Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, pp. 207–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gavarró, A, Torrens, V and Wexler, K (2010) Object clitic omission: Two language types. Language Acquisition 17, 192–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gawlitzek-Maiwald, I and Tracy, R (1996) Bilingual bootstrapping. Linguistics 34, 901–926.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grüter, T (2006) Object clitics and null objects in the acquisition of French (Doctoral dissertation). McGill University.Google Scholar
Grüter, T and Paradis, J (2014) Input and experience in bilingual development. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guasti, MT, Gavarró, A, De Lange, J and Caprin, C (2008) Article omission across child languages. Language Acquisition 15, 89–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hulk, A and Müller, N (2000) Bilingual first language acquisition at the interface between syntax and pragmatics. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3, 227–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hurtado, N, Grüter, T, Marchman, VA and Fernald, A (2014) Relative language exposure, processing efficiency and vocabulary in Spanish–English bilingual toddlers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 17, 189–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobson, PF and Schwartz, RG (2002) Morphology in incipient bilingual Spanish-speaking preschool children with specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 23, 23–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakubowicz, C, Müller, N, Riemer, B and Rigaut, C (1997) The case of subject and object omission in French and German. In Hughes E, Hughes M and Greenhill A (eds), Proceedings of the 21st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 21], 331–342. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Kaufman, AS and Kaufman, NL (2004) Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, Second Edition. Circle Pines, MN: AGS.Google Scholar
Kohnert, K (2010) Bilingual children with primary language impairment: Issues, evidence and implications for clinical actions. Journal of Communication Disorders 43, 456–473.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kupisch, T (2007) Determiners in bilingual German–Italian children: What they tell us about the relation between language influence and language dominance. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 10, 57–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kupisch, T, Müller, N and Cantone, KF (2002) Gender in monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition: Comparing Italian and French. Lingue e Linguaggio 1, 107–150.Google Scholar
Larrañaga, P and Guijarro-Fuentes, P (2012) Clitics in L1 bilingual acquisition. First Language 32, 151–175.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lutz, A (2008) Negotiating home language: Spanish maintenance and loss in Latino families. Latino(a) Research Review, 37–64.Google Scholar
Morgan, GP, Restrepo, M and Auza, A (2013) Comparison of Spanish morphology in monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children with and without language impairment. Bilingualism, Language and Cognition 16(3), 578–596.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahoney, K, Thompson, M and MacSwan, J (2004) The condition of English Language Learners in Arizona, 2004, In Molnar, A (ed), The Condition of PreK-12 Education in Arizona, 2004. Tempe, AZ: Education Policy Research Laboratory, Arizona State University, pp. 1–27.Google Scholar
Meisel, JM (2007) On autonomous syntactic development in multiple first language acquisition. In Cault-Nulton, H, Kulatilake, S and Woo, I (eds), BUCLD 31: Proceedings of the 31st annual Boston University conference on language development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, pp. 26–45.Google Scholar
Miller, K (2014) Assessing plural morphology in children acquiring /s/-leniting dialects of Spanish. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 45, 173–184.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Montrul, S and Potowski, K (2007) Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish–English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism 11, 301–328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, G, Restrepo, M.A. and Auza, A (2013) Comparison of Spanish Morphology in Monolingual and Spanish–English Bilingual Children with and Without Language Impairment. Bilingualism, Language and Cognition 578, 596.Google Scholar
Müller, N (2003) (In)vulnerable domains in multilingualism (Vol. 1). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, N and Hulk, A (2001) Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4, 1-21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mykhaylyk, R and Sopata, A (2016) Object pronouns, clitics, and omissions in child Polish and Ukrainian. Applied Psycholinguistics 37, 1051–1082. doi:10.1017/S0142716415000351CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicoladis, E and Marchak, K (2011) Le carte blanc or la carte blanche? Bilingual children's acquisition of French adjective agreement. Language Learning 61, 734–758.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nuñez-Cedeño, R (1993) Morfología de la sufijación española. Santo Domingo: Dirección de publicaciones de La Universidad Nacional Pedro Henriquez Ureña (UNPHU).Google Scholar
Paradis, J (2005) Grammatical morphology in children learning English as a second language: Implications of similarities with specific language impairment. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 36, 172–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J (2011) The interface between bilingual development and specific language impairment. Keynote article for special issue with peer commentaries. Applied Psycholinguistics 31, 3–28Google Scholar
Paradis, J and Genesee, F (1996) Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or Interdependent?. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18, 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J, Crago, M, Genesee, F and Rice, M (2003) French-English bilingual children with SLI: How do they compare with their monolingual peers? Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 46, 113–127.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paradis, J, Tremblay, A and Crago, M (2014) French-English bilingual children's sensitivity to child-level and language-level input factors in morphosyntactic acquisition. In Grüter, T and Paradis, J (eds), Input and Experience in Bilingual Development. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp 161–180.Google Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, AT, Castilla-Earls, AP and Bruner, J (2012) General and specific effects of lexicon in grammar: Determiner and object pronoun omission in child Spanish. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 313–327.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, AT, Cuza, A and Thomas, D (2011) Clitic placement in Spanish–English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 14, 221–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, AT, Pirvulescu, M and 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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, AT, Pirvulescu, M and Roberge, Y. (2018) Direct objects and language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Pereira, M (1991) The acquisition of gender: What Spanish children tell us. Journal of Child Language 18, 571–590.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pirvulescu, M, Perez-Leroux, AT, Roberge, Y, Strik, N and Thomas, D (2014) Bilingual effects: Exploring object omission in pronominal languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 17, 495–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pirvulescu, M, Roberge, Y (2005) Licit and illicit null objects in L1 French. In Gess, R and Rubin, E (eds), Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Romance Linguistics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 197–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Restrepo, MA, Gorin, J and Gray, S (2013) Screening Spanish-speaking children for language impairment: Results from a scale development grant. In: Inaugural Bilingual Research Conference, University of Houston. Houston, TX.Google Scholar
Rice, ML and Wexler, K (1996) Toward tense as a clinical marker of specific language impairment in English-speaking children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 39(6), 1239–1257.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rumbaut, R, Massey, D and Bean, F (2006) Linguistic life expectancies: Immigrant language retention in southern California. Population and Development Review 32(3), 447–460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
SAS Institute. (2014) SAS® 9.4. Cary, NC: SAS Institute Inc.Google Scholar
Schaeffer, J (1997) Direct object scrambling and clitic placement in Dutch and Italian child language. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA dissertation.Google Scholar
Schwenter, S (2006) Null objects across South America. In Face, TL and Klee, C (eds), Selected Proceedings of the 8th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, pp. 23–36.Google Scholar
Semel, E, Wiig, E.H. and Secord, W (2006) The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals 4th edition Spanish version (CELF-4 Spanish). San Antonio, TX: Pearson Education Inc.Google Scholar
Smyk, E, Restrepo, MA, Gorin, J and Gray, S (2013) Development and validation of the Spanish – English Language Proficiency Scale (SELPS). Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 44, 252–266. doi:10.1044/0161-1461(2013/12-0074)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snyder, W, Senghas, A and Inman, K (2001) Agreement morphology and the acquisition of noun-drop in Spanish. Language Acquisition 9, 157–173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tran, V (2010) English gain vs. Spanish loss? Language assimilation among second generation Latinos in young adulthood. Social Forces 89(1), 257–284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Unsworth, S (2014) Comparing the role of input in bilingual acquisition across domains. In Grüter, T and Paradis, J (eds), Input and experience in bilingual development. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 181–201.Google Scholar