Development of English lexicon and morphology in 5-year-old Serbian-English bilingual children attending first year of schooling in Australia

Satomi Kawaguchi, Lucija Medojevic

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapterpeer-review

    Abstract

    This study investigates lexical and morphological development in English in two bilingual children and one monolingual child over their first year of schooling in Australia. For the bilingual children, Serbian is their heritage language and Australian English the mainstream language including the school language. The first year of school attendance is a time when a dramatic reversal occurred in the rate of exposure to these two languages. Oral production data were collected from these children at three-month intervals over the year. The bilingual children's lexical and morphological development was compared with the Australian monolingual peer's. Processability Theory was used to measure morphological development. Results reveal that before school attendance the bilingual children show some inaccuracy in morphological markings involving past tense -ed and 3rd person singular -s on verbs. However, after the first few months of school attendance, these inaccuracies disappeared and the bilingual children's English grammatical accuracy became indistinguishable from their monolingual peer. One area of English verbal morphology that seems to be challenging for all three informants, bilingual or monolingual, was the past tense marker -ed. This suggests that acquisition of this so-called "regular" verb past tense morphology in English raises a broad developmental question. The data analysis shows that bilingual children's language development docs not lag behind once they start schooling in an exclusively English environment and may even show a lexical advantage in English by comparison with their monolingual peers.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationChina Language Strategies. Volume 2, Number 1
    Place of PublicationChina
    PublisherNanjing University Press
    Pages107-129
    Number of pages23
    ISBN (Print)9787305152429
    Publication statusPublished - 2015

    Keywords

    • second language acquisition
    • English language
    • processability approaches to language acquisition research & teaching

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