Barriers for first and second language acquisition. When delay leads to deviance .

1. Barriers for first and second language acquisition. When delay leads to deviance. 37-975-01 Challenges to Language Acquisition: Bilingualism and Language Impairment Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem Bar Ilan University

2. Simultaneous Bilinguals - Two systems or one? 2 L1s? “Under what conditions are the two languages of a bilingual child differentiated?” (e.g. Genesee, 2001; Muller & Hulk, 2000). • Unitary-language system hypothesis - The language systems are not differentiated right from the beginning - the child does not have resources to do it • Differentiated (dual)-language systems hypothesis - The language systems are differentiated right from the beginning

3. First words of a bilingual child (Shelli) – classified From: Berman, R. 1977. The role of proper nouns at the one-word stage. TAU ms. Berman, R. 1978. Early verbs. Int'l J Psycholinguistics 5: 21-29

4. Volterra and Taeschner (1977) - three stages Diary studies of simultaneous bilinguals (one parent - one language) • Words from both languages are included without differentiation • Children mixed words from both languages • A word in one language almost never had a corresponding word with the same meaning in the other language • The two lexicons are differentiated but not the syntax (~ 2) • Two different words pertaining to the two languages describe the same event or object • The pragmatic context influenced the choice of words • There are two linguistic codes distinguished in lexicon and in syntax (~3) • Both languages are used correctly at the lexical and the syntactic levels

5. Verbs & nouns in the bilingual mental lexicon Schelletter, C. (2005) Bilingual Children's Lexical Development: Factors Affecting the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs and Their Translation Equivalents. In ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. James Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, Kellie Rolstad, and Jeff MacSwan, 2095-2103. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

6. Translation equivalents • Adult bilinguals - particular groups of words and their translation equivalents have a closer relationship and are translated faster as a result. • Kroll & Stewart (1994), Kroll & de Groot (1997) and van Hell & de Groot (1998) - there is an effect of form similarity. Nouns that are similar in sound and spelling are translated faster in both translation directions. • The conceptual feature model (Kroll & De Groot 1997) - form similar words have a feature overlap in their conceptual representations in the two languages. • What about children? Can the previous findings on form similar nouns be also be extended to verbs?

7. A case study • German/English bilingual girl • Age of 1;11 to 2;8 in German and 2;2 to 2;9 in English. • Three sub-periods: period 1 from 1;11 to 2;3, period 2 from 2;4 to 2;6 and period 3 from 2;7 to 2;9.

9. Lindholm and Padilla (1977( • Language samples (2;10 and 6;2) - one experimenter/one language • Two separate linguistic systems from an early age. • Mixing (2% of utterances) mostly occurs at the lexical level - substitutions of nouns. • Mixing is due to lexical gaps or familiarity

10. Genesee (1989) “bilingual children’s mixed utterances are modeled on mixed input produced by others” (p. 169).

11. Lanza (1992) • Longitudinal study • A great impact of language input, the context of the conversation, and parental strategies toward child language mixing, dominance. • Mixing per se is not enough in order to determine that the child does not differentiate his two languages

12. Quay (1995) • Longitudinal study • By 1;10 - Over 50 pairs

13. Sequential Bilingual: The role of Universal Grammar (UG) in L2A - Transfer vs. Access. • Full Transfer/No Access • No Transfer/Full Access (e.g., Ritchie, 1978; Felix, 1988, Epstein, Flynn & Martohardjono 1996) • Full Transfer/Full Access (e.g., Schwartz & Sprouse 1996) • Partial Transfer/Full Access (e.g. Eubank 1994, Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994; 1996)

14. Full Transfer/No Access • No aspect of UG, not instantiated in the native language (L1), is available to the learner (cf. Bley-Vroman 1989, Clahsen 1988). Thus the learner has to rely only on her knowledge of L1 and on some learning strategies. • Since UG is not available to the learner, similarities to first language acquisition will be viewed as artifacts that might reflect the influence of L1, rather than evidence for access to UG.

15. No Transfer/Full Access • UG in full constrains Second Language Acquisition. L1 does not affect L2; there is no transfer of any principles, parameters, or rules from L1 to L2. • These assumptions entail a similar course of acquisition for L1 and L2.

16. Full Transfer/Full Access • The process starts with transfer from L1 parameters and values to L2, but the correction by the L2 learner is made by parameter resetting which is constrained by UG. • The duality of FT/FA predicts that the development of the grammar in L2 follows a similar path to the one seen in the development of L1. Any divergence from this path is attributed to the L1 influence.

17. Partial Transfer/Full Access • L1 structure is available to L2 learners with underspecified slots, i.e. with no features. L1 structure is the baseline, but UG is accessed in order to specify the slots and set the features to the L2 values. • The Minimal Trees hypothesis

18. These hypotheses were made for adult learners. Does it matter? Are children different? Is there a critical period for access to UG?

19. Subject omission Allen, S. (2006)Language acquisition in inuktitut-english bilinguals. Paper presented at the Conference on Language Acquisition and Bilingualism: Consequences for a Multilingual Society, Boston University • 6 Inuktitut-English bilingual children • aged 1;8 to 2;11 at onset, taped for one year • 5 children have two bilingual Inuit parents • 1 child has English-speaking father and bilingual mother • naturalistic data collected via videotape (Allen, Genesee, Fish & Crago 2002)

20. Contrastive analysis English • overt subjects usually required (e.g. John ate the cake.) • subject omission allowed in imperatives and certain colloquial instances (e.g. ____ Eat the cake!) Inuktitut • overt subjects only required for emphasis or disambiguation • subject omission allowed in all other instances (Zwanziger, Allen & Genesee 2005)

21. Predictions If no crosslinguistic influence • subject omission rates similar to monolinguals in both languages If crosslinguistic influence • subject omission rates different from monolinguals in one or both languages (Zwanziger, Allen & Genesee 2005)

22. English (Zwanziger, Allen & Genesee 2005) Inuktitut

23. Object omission Yip, V. and S. Matthews (2005)Dual Input and Learnability: Null Objects in Cantonese-English Bilingual Children. In ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. James Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, Kellie Rolstad, and Jeff MacSwan, 2421-2431. Somerville,MA: Cascadilla Press. • Simultaneously bilinguals , Cantonese/English, Longitudinal recordings, ages 1;6 - 3;6.

24. Null objects in ML • Roeper (1981, 140) “All subcategorizations are obligatory until positive evidence shows that they are optional”. • Ingham (1993:109) - Naomi 1;08-1;11, 4.8% (12/251 tokens). • Huang (1999) - Adam 2;05–2;09, 3.5%

26. Why? An analysis of null objects Mueller (1998:153) - Input ambiguity: transfer may occur when “two different grammatical hypotheses are compatible with the same surface string.” (a) the target analysis applicable to adult English, in which the missing object is not syntactically present, but interpreted semantically as generic: eat β [+generic] (b) the analysis based on Chinese grammar (see examples 22-25), in which the missing object is syntactically present, coreferential with a null topic and therefore interpreted as specific: [TOPIC ]i eat x i [+specific]

27. Is there a critical period for L1 acquisition? • Lennenberg (1967) – A biological basis to the critical period. Around puberty when left hemisphere lateralization is complete. Child aphasics can recover language function, whereas adults cannot. • Seliger (1979) – Plasticity of the left hemisphere. Multiple critical periods. Genie, Chelsea. • Newport (1990) – Three groups of deaf children exposed to ASL at different ages (early childhood, 4-6, 12) >>> There are several sensitive periods for learning different language functions.

28. Sign Language (Mayberry 1993)

29. Brain Studies

30. Is there a critical period for L2 acquisition?

31. Kim & Hirsch (1997) • fMRI study • Two groups of bilingual people: • Group 1 – Child L2 learners • Group 2 – Adult L2 learners • Task: think of what you did that day, first in L1 then in L2. • Findings: • both groups used the same part of Wernicke's area for both languages • Group 1 used the same part of Broca's area for L1 and L2 • Group 2 used a part of Broca's area next to the L1 processing area for L2

32. Possible explanations • In childhood all language is hardwired in one area. Once hardwiring is complete a different area of the brain must be used – critical period • L2 Acquisition vs. L2 learning - Different kinds of input are stored in different parts of the brain

33. Johnson & Newport (1989) “Critical period effects in second language learning; The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language”.Cognitive Psychology21: 60-99 • A clear relationship between age of arrival toUSA (of 46 Korean or Chinese speakers) and the ability to judge grammaticality of English sentences (containing 12 different types of rules(

34. Long, M. H. 1990. Maturational constraints on language development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition12:251-285 • Adults proceed through early stages of morphological and syntactic development faster than children (where time and exposure are held constant). • Older children acquire faster than younger children (again in early stages of morphology and syntax, where time and exposure are held constant0. • Child starters outperform adult starters in the long run.

35. Flynn & Manuel (1992). • “Age dependent effects in language acquisition: An evaluation of critical period hypothesis." • More than one critical period. UG is available for adults too.

36. Birdsong, D. 1992. Ultimate attainment in second language acquisition. Language68:706-753 • L2 learners’ success/ failure to reach ultimate attainment in the L2 is due to the similarity/ variance between the L1 and the L2.

37. DeKeyser, R. M. 2000. The robustness of critical period effects in second language acquisition.Studies in Second Language Acquisition. • The affect of language aptitude. The affect of structural saliency.

38. Bialystok 1997 Criticism of Johnson & Newport on every possible level: experimental technique, age related factors, etc. • Observations: • Knowing a system in L1 facilitates its learning in L2 (German and English speakers learning French nominal system). • Length of residence affects judgment, not age of arrival (Chinese speakers’ grammaticality judgment in English) • Different experimental techniques may lead to different conclusions • Children’s successful attainment is due to different learning style • Conclusion: • All kinds of knowledge are acquired in the same way, the only difference being the amount of past experience which is brought into the process. • There is no evidence for critical period for language learning

39. Questions: • Why does the influence of L1 on L2 entail that there is no critical period? • Why can’t different tasks affect the results if there is a critical period? • Correcting written samples is more natural for adult learners • Is translation the same a natural processing? • Isn’t translation the thing that adult learners do, but young ones don’t? • Is it the case that there is no critical period for language learning but there is a critical period for language replacement?

40. Definiteness in L2 Hebrew of bilingual children with L1 Russian (Armon-Lotem 2005) • Russian immigrant children aged 10 to 12, who have been exposed to Hebrew for six or seven years • Both parents speak Russian at home, though all know Hebrew. • Children speak Russian with parents, and Hebrew with siblings and friends • All children study at the same school and are from middle SES

41. Focus of study: Barriers to second language acquisition (Bialystok, 1997) • Amount and type of exposure (Snow & Hoefnagel-Hohle, 1978) • Length of residence • Difference in learning style • Different motivation between children and adults.

42. Method • Test groups: • Three groups of L2 Hebrew children, according to age of arrival (3, 4;6, and 6) • Two groups of L1 Hebrew controls (aged 10 and 12). • 10 subjects in each group • Tasks • A yes/no judgment task • A picture elicitation task

43. The yes/no judgment Tasks • 11 categories of pragmatic and syntactic environment where the definite article should, or shouldn’t be used (cf. Fruchtman 1982) • Both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. • Subject were asked to mark sentences as linguistically correct and incorrect

44. The picture elicitation task • 5 categories of pragmatic and syntactic environment where the definite article should, or shouldn’t be used (cf. Fruchtman 1982) • Subjects were presented with a picture and were asked to complete a description of the picture.

45. Findings - Judgment Task Number and percentage of correct results: a cross-group comparison 85% 90% 77% 66% 66%

46. Across-groupcomparison • Children who were exposed to Hebrew from the age of three scored significantly better than those arriving at a later age. • They scored marginally lower than their age matched controls. • Children who were exposed to Hebrew after the age of 4;6 scored significantly lower than their age matched controls.

47. Group profile: Individual scores within groups Number of correct responses [N= 26]

48. Comparing the groups on the different categories • On nine of the eleven categories, 3/7 scored better than the 6/6 group, on one category they scored the same, and on one worse, but this was not significant. • On eight of the eleven categories, 3/7 scored better than the 4/6 group, on two category they scored the same, and on one worse, but this was not significant. • There was no significant difference between the 4/6 and 6/6 groups. • Only three categories showed negative correlation between success and age for all three groups. • Both control groups scored better (average of 88% correct answers) on all categories, except one, on which the youngest L2 children scored better.

49. Findings - Picture Elicitation Task Percentage of correct results: a cross-group comparison • Similar results of a negative correlation between success and age were found on the picture elicitation task, with the 3/7 group scoring significantly better then the other two groups. • On three of the five categories, 3/7 scored better than both groups, and on one categories they scored the same. All groups scored at ceiling on the fifth category

50. Comparison across tasks Percentage of correct results across tasks No significant differences were found between the two tasks