澳洲塞尔维亚语-英语双语儿童入学第一年英语词汇和形态发展

Development of English Lexicon and Morphology in 5-year-old Serbian-English Bilingual Children Attending First Year of Schooling in Australia

本研究探讨两名塞尔维亚语-澳大利亚英语双语儿童和一名澳大利亚英语单语儿童在澳大利亚入学第一年的英语词汇和形态发展,对于这两名双语儿童,塞尔维亚语是他们的传承语,而澳大利亚英语是学校和其他社会环境中的主流语言。入学的第一年会使他们的两种语言输入比率产生巨大的逆转。本研究历时一年每间隔三个月收集这三名儿童的口语语料,并比较双语儿童与同龄的澳大利亚英语单语儿童的词汇和形态发展,可加工性理论被用来测量形态发展,结果表明,入学前双语儿童在动词过去式-ed和第三人称单数-s形态标记方面不准确,然而,入学几个月后,这些不准确现象消失,双语儿童的英语语法的准确性与同龄的单语儿童难以区分。英语动词过去式形态-ed似乎对三名受试者,无论是双语儿童还是单语儿童,都具有挑战性,这表明儿童获得英语中所谓“规则”动词的过去式形态方面的问题具有普遍发展特征。数据分析表明,一旦双语儿童开始在全英文环境下学习,他们的语言发展并不落后于单语儿童,甚至可能在英语词汇方面比英语单语儿童更显优势。

This study investigates lexical and morphological development in English in two bilingual children and one monolingual child over their first year of schooling in Australia.For the bilingual children,Serbian is their heritage language and Australian English the mainstream language including the school language.The first year of school attendance is a time when a dramatic reversal occurred in the rate of exposure to these two languages.Oral production data were collected from these children at three month intervals over the year.The bilingual children's lexical and morphological development was compared with the Australian monolingual peer's.Processability Theory was used to measure morphological development.Results reveal that before school attendance the bilingual children show some inaccuracy in morphological markings involving pasttense-ed and 3rd person singular's on verbs.However,after the first few months of school attendance,these inaccuracies disappeared and the bilingual children's English grammatical accuracy became indistinguishable from their monolingual peer.One area of English verbal morphology that seems to be challenging for all three informants,bilingual or monolingual,was the past tense marker-ed.This suggests that acquisi-tion of this so-called“regular”verb past tense morphology in English raises a broad developmental question.The data analysis shows that bilingual children's language development does not lag behind once they start schooling in an exclusively English environment and may even show a lexical advantage in English by comparison with their monolingual peers.