Effect of time of exposure to L2 on the comprehension of relative clauses in primary school children

• Thesis title in Czech: Vliv doby působení druhého jazyka na chápání vztažných vět u dětí školního věku
• Thesis title in English: Effect of time of exposure to L2 on the comprehension of relative clauses in primary school children
• Key words: bilingvismus|dvojjazyčnost|bilingvní osvojování řeči|dětský bilingvismus|simultánní bilingvismus|sekvenční bilingvismus|doba působení druhého jazyka|osvojování řeči|porozumění jazyku|vztažné věty|příznakovost|jmenná fráze|tvarová shoda/neshoda v čísle|syntax|morfologie
• English key words: bilingualism|bilingual acquisition|childhood bilingualism|language acquisition|language comprehension|bilingual brain|simultaneous bilingual|sequential bilingual|time of exposure|age of onset|relative clauses|markedness|Subject relative|Object relative|number dissimilarity|syntax|morphology
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2015/2016
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of the English Language and ELT Methodology (21-UAJD)
• Supervisor: doc. Luca Cilibrasi, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 21.09.2016
• Date of assignment: 21.09.2016
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 12.10.2016
• Date and time of defence: 10.09.2018 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 08.08.2018
• Date of proceeded defence: 10.09.2018
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: PhDr. Tomáš Gráf, Ph.D.
• Advisors: doc. PhDr. Markéta Malá, Ph.D.

Guidelines

The present study investigates the comprehension of relative clauses in 2 groups of bilingual children. One is a group of simultaneous bilinguals (children that were exposed to English and Czech from birth), and the second group is a group of early bilinguals (children that were exposed to Czech from birth and to English once they started attending school). Previous research has shown that age of exposure to L2 may have an important impact in the development of reading abilities in children (Kovelman et al, 2008) but little is known about the causes of this effect and little is known about verbal (spoken) comprehension differences in these two groups. This MA thesis aims at filling this gap.
In order to conduct this study Ms Brabcová will recruit 20 children that were exposed to English and Czech from birth, and 20 children that were exposed to Czech from birth and to English at school. Children will be recruited from the Prague British School, Parklane International School and the International School of Prague; all schools already agreed to collaborate in the project. Children will be tested with a syntactic test developed by Adani et al. (2014). The test unfolds in this way: children hear a spoken sentence (specifically, either a subject or an object relative clause) from a laptop and are asked to choose among two pictures (with inverted theta roles) the one that better represents the sentence. For instance, children may hear the sentence: “show me the lion that washes the elephant” and be presented with two pictures, one in which the lion is actually washing the elephant, and one in which the elephant is washing the lion. A morphological manipulation is also made in the test. Some sentences have NPs with matching number (i.e. show me the lion that washes the elephant), and some have NPs with mismatching number (i.e. show me the lions that wash the elephant).
Additional pre-testing will be conducted using the Coloured Progressive Matrices (Raven, 2000) for non-verbal abilities, and the Children’s Test of Non-word Repetition for phonological performance (Gathercole et al, 1994). Based on previous literature we expect simultaneous bilinguals to outperform early bilinguals overall (Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007), but a prediction on the effect of syntactic complexity (SR vs OR) and on the effect of morphological complexity (number match vs mismatch) cannot be made due to the lack of research on this specific problem.

References

Adani, F., Forgiarini, M., Guasti, M. T., & Van Der Lely, H. K. (2014). Number dissimilarities facilitate the comprehension of relative clauses in children with (Grammatical) Specific Language Impairment. Journal of child language, 41(04), 811-841.

Arnon, I. (2010). Rethinking child difficulty : the effect of NP type on children’s processing of relative clauses in Hebrew. Journal of Child Language 37(1), 27–57.

Contemori, C., & Marinis, T. (2014). The impact of number mismatch and passives on the real-time processing of relative clauses. Journal of child language, 41(03), 658-689.

Correˆa, L. (1995). An alternative assessment of children’s comprehension of relative clauses.

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Diessel, H. & Tomasello, M. (2000). The development of relative clauses in spontaneous child speech. Cognitive Linguistics 11(1/2), 131–51.

Friedmann, N., Belletti, A. & Rizzi, L. (2009). Relativized relatives. Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua 119, 67–88.

Gathercole, S. E., Willis, C. S., Baddeley, A. D., & Emslie, H. (1994). The children's test of nonword repetition: A test of phonological working memory. Memory, 2(2), 103-127.

Guasti, M. T. (2004). Language acquisition: The growth of grammar. MIT Press.

Guasti, M. T. (in press). The bilingual child. MIT Press.

Kovelman, I., Baker, S. A., & Petitto, L. A. (2008). Bilingual and monolingual brains compared: a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation of syntactic processing and a possible “neural signature” of bilingualism. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 20(1), 153-169.

Raven, J. (2000). The Raven's progressive matrices: change and stability over culture and time. Cognitive psychology, 41(1), 1-48.

Tsimpli, I. M., & Dimitrakopoulou, M. (2007). The interpretability hypothesis: Evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 23(2), 215-242.

van der Lely, H. K. J. (1998). SLI in children: movement, economy, and deficits in the computational-syntactic system. Language Acquisition : A Journal of Developmental Linguistics 7(2–4), 161–92.