Despite growing research on individual differences in child bilinguals, few studies have focused on the development of syntax, included both languages, and studied newly arrived school-age migrant children. Accordingly, this study investigated the syntactic development of heritage language (HL) Syrian Arabic and L2 English by Syrian refugee children (N = 119) recently arrived in Canada using a sentence repetition task. Regression analyses showed that a partially overlapping set of child-level (input and cognitive skills) and language-level (syntactic structure) factors accounted for performance in each language. HL performance was particularly sensitive to language, cognitive, and input variables indexing cumulative HL exposure. L2 performance, however, was sensitive to cognitive and environmental variables indexing current and cumulative L2 use. Finally, despite stronger performance in Arabic than in English, results revealed interdependence between the two languages, indicating that participants with stronger syntactic abilities in their HL tended to have stronger syntactic abilities in their emerging L2.

尽管对双语儿童个体差异的研究越来越多，但很少有研究关注句法的发展，包括两种语言，并研究新来的学龄流动儿童。因此，本研究调查了叙利亚难民儿童（N= 119) 最近使用句子重复任务抵达加拿大。回归分析表明，一组部分重叠的儿童水平（输入和认知技能）和语言水平（句法结构）因素解释了每种语言的表现。HL 表现对指示累积 HL 暴露的语言、认知和输入变量特别敏感。然而，二语表现对索引当前和累积二语使用的认知和环境变量很敏感。最后，尽管阿拉伯语的表现优于英语，但结果显示两种语言之间存在相互依赖关系，这表明在 HL 中具有更强句法能力的参与者往往在其新兴的 L2 中具有更强的句法能力。