This longitudinal study investigates the effect of the first year of schooling on the development of two languages in 5-year-old bilingual first language acquirers (BFLA) receiving linguistic input in two typologically different languages: Serbian, the heritage language, predominantly spoken at home, and English, the mainstream language of the school and other social environments, and to a lesser extent, in the home of heritage language acquirers in Australia. The first year of school attendance was a time when a dramatic reversal occurred in the exposure to each of these typologically distant languages. The change in exposure was from a point where, in some cases, Serbian had had the larger share of the time in the daily life of the child to a point where exposure to and interaction in English took up the bulk of the day. The three informants in this study are two 5-year-old Serbian-Australian children: one second generation female child, codenamed Dana, and one third generation male child, codenamed Tomas, as well as one Australian English monolingual child, as control, codenamed Adam, who attended the same class in the same public school as Tomas. A baseline for both Australian English and Serbian was obtained for the bilingual children by recording them in each language, separately, just before commencing school (t0). They were again recorded at three month intervals (t1, and t2), and at the end of the school year (t3), using a range of communicative tasks. The English L1 control was interviewed in parallel t1-t3 sessions. Following applications to bilingual first language acquisition such as Qi (2004) and Itani-Adams (2007), the same metrics were used to measure development in both languages to allow for comparison against a single reference point, namely Processability Theory (PT). PT is also starting to be used in first language acquisition studies (e.g., Wirbatz, 2013). The single metric used for measuring morphosyntactic development is Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998). Its recent extension (Pienemann, Di Biase and Kawaguchi 2005; Bettoni and Di Biase, forthcoming) is used for measuring lexical growth and syntactic development (Lexical Mapping Hypothesis) on the one hand, and development at the discourse-pragmatic interface (Discourse Function Hypothesis) on the other hand. This study also investigates, albeit in a limited way, the development of children's storytelling abilities over the first year of school in the narrative context of the wordless picture-book Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969) within Berman and Slobin's (1994) tradition. There were significant differences between the results for the second generation child and the third generation child. The results reveal, first, that English developed in a similar way in all three informants, regardless of second or third generation bilingual or monolingual status. Dana's English was arguably the more developed of the three children. Second, the Serbian language complex and late-developing systems, such as verb morphology and case marking, in the case of Tomas (third generation bilingual) remained underdeveloped at this stage of the child's life, as they had not been in place when the child commenced school. Tomas, nevertheless, became much more aware of the boundaries between Serbian and English, which effectively made his home variety of Serbian more 'Serbian-like' but at the same time his use of Serbian receded as it could not match his new communicative needs. Tomas' English, however, developed strongly, including his narrative skills, and it quickly became indistinguishable from his native counterpart. The results also show that Dana, whose morphosyntactic development on commencing school was close to native Serbian children her age, not only improved her English but also her Serbian. Despite the reduced Serbian input, Dana's Serbian benefited from the overall maturational and linguistic development occurring throughout her first year of schooling. Surprisingly, Dana presented a "lexical spurt" in Serbian, including new verbs, especially between t0 and t1 with a steady lexical development through to t3, which shows the consolidation and generalisation of her case-marking system over a greater lexical area. She also clearly developed her narrative skills in both English and Serbian. Taken together, the study's results provide insights into the nature, development and interaction of the two linguistic systems in children of different generations in the same age group, which has positive practical implications for parents and teachers alike.
| Date of Award | 2014 |
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| Original language | English |
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