Showing papers by "Theodoros Marinis published in 2011"

Differential effects of internal and external factors on the development of vocabulary, tense morphology and morpho-syntax in successive bilingual children

Abstract: The present study investigates the effects of child internal (age/time) and child external/environmental factors on the development of a wide range of language domains in successive bilingual (L2) Turkish-English children of homogeneously low SES. Forty-three L2 children were tested on standardized assessments examining the acquisition of vocabulary and morpho-syntax. The L2 children exhibited a differential acquisition of the various domains: they were better on the general comprehension of grammar and tense morphology and less accurate on the acquisition of vocabulary and (complex) morpho-syntax. Profile effects were confirmed by the differential effects of internal and external factors on the language domains. The development of vocabulary and complex syntax were affected by internal and external factors, whereas external factors had no contribution to the development of tense morphology. These results are discussed in light of previous studies on the impact of internal and external factors in child L2 acquisition.

Internal and external factors in child second language acquisition: introduction

Abstract: An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various articles published within the issue including one on morphosyntactic development and vocabulary, one on acquisition of grammatical gender, and one on the importance of the low proficiency in immigrant families..

9. Voicing language dominance

Abstract: This paper investigates the linguistic performance of a group of English-Spanish­ bilingual children (N = 44, age range: 10–14) with different degrees of language dominance in their use of the Spanish preposition ‘a’ using a completion task which measures the different conditions that relate to the distribution of this personal (Torrego 1998; Zagona 2002) The children’s performance was compared to a group of monolingual Spanish children of similar age (n = 10, age range: 12–15) All participants had also to complete an ethno-linguistic task which elicits data to address the impact of some external factors (eg, language dominance and language choices) in language performance Results revealed that bilingual children were less accurate than monolingual children in the use of the preposition ‘a’, but the two groups showed a similar pattern of errors regardless of their grade of bilingualism More importantly, their linguistic performance does not seem to be related to any of the external factors included in this study In line with previous research in the field, we also claim that phenomena involving the syntax-semantics interface are vulnerable in bilingual children irrespective of the grade of bilingualism and external factors (ie, language dominance and language choice)