Bergeron, E. 1 , Royle, P. 1, 2 & Marquis, A. 3, 2
1 Université de Montréal
2 Centre for Research on Language Mind and Brain
3 Université du Québec à Montréal
Many children attending French schools in Montreal use another language at home, and are exposed to French only when entering kindergarten. These children are at risk of presenting a language delay and are often misdiagnosed as having a language disorder. Language assessment in the context of second language learning is problematic as the use of standardized tests can under-evaluate children’s real capacities. The proper understanding of bilingual children’s second language acquisition must be based on scientific knowledge of typical second language acquisition, the purpose of our study. Ten children with Spanish as their first language, aged 4 to 6 years, and exposed to French for one year on average participated in elicitation tasks for French noun phrases with masculine or feminine, variable or invariable, color and size adjectives (e.g., La petite maison blanche ‘the little white house’). Results were compared to those of monolingual French children matched on age, sex, and parents’ educational level. Global analyses on scores (presence of all elements, respect of agreement and word order rules) reveal that bilingual children perform below French children on all tasks except color naming. Repeated measures ANOVAs were computed on scores for adjectives with variability (variable and invariable) and gender (masculine and feminine) as within factors, and participant group as the between factor. Variable feminine adjectives were more difficult to produce for bilinguals (31,67%) than for monolinguals (83,33%), while other French adjectives resulted in similar response patterns in both groups. Transfer effects from Spanish to French were found for syntactic but not morphosyntactic structures. These results allow for the identification of normal difficulties in variable adjective agreement and the production of complex French noun phrases in children learning a second language. We contrast these results with those found for children with language impairment presented in previous work.