Abstract
The present study investigates whether the tense-aspect development of Cantonese-English bilingual children conforms to the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai 1994. Discourse motivations for some cognitive acquisition principles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16(2). 133–156.), which has been shown to predict the development of monolingual children of many different languages well, and whether the two languages influence each other during development. Analysis of longitudinal production data from three Cantonese-English bilinguals (Yip and Matthews 2000. Syntactic transfer in a Cantonese-English bilingual child. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3(3). 193–208.) shows that the development of bilingual children resemble that of monolingual children and generally follow the Aspect Hypothesis, but to a lesser degree. Interactions were also observed in that the acquisition of the Cantonese progressive marker gan was accelerated by the -ing in the bilingual children, and transfer from Cantonese to English allowed them to use the English past tense marking with verbs of different lexical aspect early in their development, deviating from the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented as a keynote address at the Conference on Bilingual Acquisition in Early Childhood held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, December 11-12, 2008. The research is supported in part by a grant awarded to the first author from the Japan Iron and Steel/Mitsubishi Graduate Fellowship in Japanese Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. We thank Kristopher Geda and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Any remaining errors are ours.
References
Aksu-Koç, Ayhan. 1998. The role of input vs. universal predispositions in the emergence of tense-aspect morphology: Evidence from Turkish. First Language 18(54). 255–280.10.1177/014272379801805402Search in Google Scholar
Almgren, Margareta & Barreña. Andoni. 2001. Bilingual acquisition and separation of linguistic codes: Ergativity in Basque versus accusativity in Spanish. In Keith E. Nelson, Ayhan Aksu-Koç & Carolyn E. Johnson (eds.), Children’s language (Vol. 11), 27–48. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Search in Google Scholar
Almgren, Margareta & Itziar Idiazabal. 2001. Past tense verb forms, discourse context and input features in bilingual and monolingual acquisition of Basque and Spanish. In J. Cenoz & F. Genesee (eds.), Trends in bilingual acquisition, 107–130. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/tilar.1.07almSearch in Google Scholar
Andersen, Roger W. 1989. La adquisicíon de la morfología verbal. Lingüística 1. 89–141.Search in Google Scholar
Andersen, Roger W. 1991. Developmental sequences: The emergence of aspect marking in second language acquisition. In Thom Huebner & Charles A. Ferguson (eds.), Crosscurrents in SLA and linguistic theories, 305–324. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Search in Google Scholar
Andersen, Roger W. 1993. Four operating principles and input distribution as explanations for underdeveloped and mature morphological systems. In Kenneth Hyltenstam & Åke Viberg (eds.), Progression and regression in language, 309–339. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Andersen, Roger W. & Yasuhiro Shirai. 1996. The primacy of aspect in first and second language acquisition: The pidgin-creole connection. In William C. Ritchie & Tej K. Bhatia (eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition, 527–570. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.10.1016/B978-012589042-7/50018-9Search in Google Scholar
Andersen, Roger W. & Yaushiro Shirai. 1994. Discourse motivations for some cognitive acquisition principles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16(2). 133–156.10.1017/S0272263100012845Search in Google Scholar
Antinucci, Francesco & Ruth Miller. 1976. How children talk about what happened. Journal of Child Language 3(2). 169–189.10.1017/S0305000900001434Search in Google Scholar
Bickerton, Derek. 1981. Roots of language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.Search in Google Scholar
Bloom, Lois, Karin Lifter & Jeremie Hafitz. 1980. Semantics of verbs and the development of verb inflection in child language. Language 56(2). 386–412.10.1353/lan.1980.0001Search in Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. 1988. The development of English aspectual systems: Aspectualizers and post-verbal particles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bronckart, Jean-Paul & Hermina Sinclair. 1973. Time, tense, and aspect. Cognition 2(1). 107–130.10.1016/0010-0277(72)90032-7Search in Google Scholar
Brown, Roger. 1973. A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.10.4159/harvard.9780674732469Search in Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Castro, Damaris & Elena Gavruseva. 2003. Finiteness and aspect in Spanish/English bilingual acquisition. First Language 23(2). 171–192.10.1177/01427237030232002Search in Google Scholar
Chen, Jidong & Yasuhiro Shirai. 2010. The development of aspectual marking in child Mandarin Chinese. Applied Psycholinguistics 38(1). 1–28.10.1017/S0142716409990257Search in Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
De Houwer, Annick. 1990. The acquisition of two languages from birth: A case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511519789Search in Google Scholar
De Houwer, Annick. 2009. Bilingual first language acquisition. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.10.21832/9781847691507Search in Google Scholar
Degani, Tamar & Natasha Tokowicz. 2010 Semantic ambiguity within and across languages: An integrative review. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 63(7). 1266–1303.10.1080/17470210903377372Search in Google Scholar
Deuchar, Margaret & Suzanne Quay. 2000. Bilingual acquisition: Theoretical implications of a case study (Vol. 2). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Döpke, Susanne. 2000. Generation of and retraction from cross-linguistically motivated structures in bilingual first language acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3(3). 209–226.10.1017/S1366728900000341Search in Google Scholar
Dowty, David R. 1977. Toward a semantic analysis of verb aspect and the English ‘imperfective’ progressive. Linguistics and Philosophy 1(1). 45–77.10.1007/BF00351936Search in Google Scholar
Ellis, Rod. 1985. Understanding second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Gathercole, Virginia M. 2007. Miami and North Wales, so far and yet so near: A constructivist account of morpho-syntactic development in bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 10. 224–247.10.2167/beb442.0Search in Google Scholar
Gawlitzek-Maiwald, Ira & Rosemarie Tracy. 1996. Bilingual bootstrapping. Linguistics 34(5). 901–926.10.1515/ling.1996.34.5.901Search in Google Scholar
Genesee, Fred & Elena Nicoladis. 2007. Bilingual first language acquisition. In Erika Hoff & Marilyn Shatz (eds.), Blackwell handbook of language development, 324–342. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.10.1002/9780470757833.ch16Search in Google Scholar
Gu, Chloe. C. 2010. Crosslinguistic influence in two directions: The acquisition of dative construction in Cantonese-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism 14(1). 87–103.10.1177/1367006909356646Search in Google Scholar
Hatch, Evelyn. 1983. Psycholinguistics: A second language perspective. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.Search in Google Scholar
Juan-Garau, Maria & Perez-Vidal. Carmen 2000. Subject realization in the syntactic development of a bilingual child. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3(3). 173–191.10.1017/S1366728900000328Search in Google Scholar
Krasinski, Emily. 1995. The development of past marking in a bilingual child and the punctual-nonpunctual distinction. First Language 15(45). 239–276.10.1177/014272379501504501Search in Google Scholar
Krashen, Stephen. 1977. Some issues relating to the Monitor Model. In H. Douglas Brown, Carlos A. Yorio & Ruth H. Crymes (eds.), On TESOL’77, 144–158. Washington, DC: TESOL.Search in Google Scholar
Lardiere, Donna. 2003. Revisiting the comparative fallacy: A reply to Lakshmanan and Selinker, 2001. Second Language Research 19(2). 129–143.10.1191/0267658303sr216oaSearch in Google Scholar
Lee, Thomas H.-T. & Cathy Wong. 1998. CANCORP: The Hong Kong Cantonese child language corpus. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 27(2). 211–228.10.3406/clao.1998.1535Search in Google Scholar
Lee, Thomas. H.-T., Colleen H. Wong & Cathy S.-P. Wong. 1996. Functional categories in child Cantonese. In Thomas H.-T. Lee, Colleen H. Wong, Samuel C.-S. Leung, Patricia Man, Alice Cheung, Kitty Szeto & Cathy S.-P. Wong (eds.), The development of grammatical competence in Cantonese-speaking children: Report of Hong Kong RGC, 155–174. Hong Kong: RGC.Search in Google Scholar
Leone, P. 1990. Tense and aspect in Italian: A bias in the distribution of verbal inherent semantics and verbal morphology. Los Angeles: Applied Linguistics, University of California, Unpublished term paper. Cited in Andersen (1993).Search in Google Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Search in Google Scholar
Matthews, Stephen & Virginia Yip. 2002. Relative clauses in early bilingual development: Transfer and universals. In Anna Giacalone Ramat (ed.), Typology and second language acquisition, 39–81. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110891249.39Search in Google Scholar
Matthews, Stephen & Virginia Yip. 2011. Cantonese: A comprehensive grammar, 2nd edn. Oxford: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Meisel, Jürgen M. 1989. Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In Kenneth Hyltenstam & Loraine K. Obler (eds.), Bilingualism across the lifespan: Aspects of acquisition, maturity and loss, 13–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511611780.003Search in Google Scholar
Mishina-Mori, Satomi. 2005. Autonomous and interdependent development of two language systems in Japanese/English simultaneous bilinguals: Evidence form question formation. First Language 25(3). 291–315.10.1177/0142723705052560Search in Google Scholar
Montrul, Silvina A. 2012. Is the heritage language like a second language? Eurosla Yearbook 12(1). 1–29.10.1075/eurosla.12.03monSearch in Google Scholar
Müller, Natascha. 1998. Transfer in bilingual first language acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1(3). 151–171.10.1017/S1366728998000261Search in Google Scholar
Nicoladis, Elena, Amdrea Palmer & Paula Marentette. 2007. The role of type and token frequency in using past tense morphemes correctly. Developmental Science 10(2). 237–254.10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00582.xSearch in Google Scholar
Paradis, Johanne. 2010. Bilingual children’s acquisition of English verb morphology: Effects of language exposure, structure complexity, and task type. Language Learning 60(3). 651–680.10.1111/j.1467-9922.2010.00567.xSearch in Google Scholar
Paradis, Johanne & Fred Genesee. 1996. Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or interdependent? Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18(1). 1–25.10.1017/S0272263100014662Search in Google Scholar
Park, Sunny. 2008. Wh-questions in Korean-English bilinguals: Is there cross-linguistic influence? Paper presented at the Conference on Bilingual Acquisition in Early Childhood, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 11-12 December.Search in Google Scholar
Peng, Ling- Ling. 1998. The development of wh-questions in a Cantonese/English bilingual child. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Unpublished M.Phil. thesis. Cited in Yip & Matthews (2000).Search in Google Scholar
Rafael, Salaberry, M.. 1999. The development of past tense verbal morphology in classroom L2 Spanish. Applied Linguistics 20(2). 151–178.10.1093/applin/20.2.151Search in Google Scholar
Rieckborn, Susanne. 2006. The development of forms and functions in the acquisition of tense and aspect in German-French bilingual children. In Conxita Lleo (ed.), Interfaces in multilingualism: Acquisition and representation, 61–90. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.10.1075/hsm.4.04rieSearch in Google Scholar
Sachs, Jacqueline. 1983. Talking about the there and then: The emergence of displaced reference in parent-child discourse. In K. E. Nelson (ed.), Children’s language (Vol. 4), 1–28. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Search in Google Scholar
Sandoval, Tiffany C., Tamar H. Gollan, Victor S. Ferreira & David P. Salmon. 2010. What causes the bilingual disadvantage in verbal fluency? The dual-task analogy. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 13(2). 231–252.10.1017/S1366728909990514Search in Google Scholar
Schlyter, Suzanne. 1990. The acquisition of tense and aspect. In Jürgen M. Meisel (ed.), Two first languages: Early grammatical development in bilingual children, 87–122. Dordrecht: Foris Publications Holland.10.1515/9783110846065.87Search in Google Scholar
Serratrice, Ludovica. 2001. The emergence of verbal morphology and the lead-lag pattern issue in bilingual acquisition. In Jasone Cenoz & Fred Genesee (eds.), Trends in bilingual acquisition, 43–70. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/tilar.1.04serSearch in Google Scholar
Serratrice, Ludovica. 2002. Overt subjects in English: Evidence for the marking of person in an English-Italian bilingual child. Journal of Child Language 29(2). 327–355.10.1017/S0305000902005068Search in Google Scholar
Shirai, Yasuhiro. 1991. Primacy of aspect in language acquisition: Simplified input and prototype. Los Angeles, CA: University of California, Los Angeles dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Shirai, Yasuhiro. 1992. Conditions on transfer: A connectionist approach. Issues in Applied Linguistics 3(1). 91–120.10.5070/L431005153Search in Google Scholar
Shirai, Yasuhiro. 1995. Tense-aspect marking by L2 learners of Japanese. In Dawn MacLaughlin & Susan McEwen (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol. 2, 575–586. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Search in Google Scholar
Shirai, Yasuhiro. 1998. The emergence of tense-aspect morphology in Japanese: Universal predisposition? First Language 18(54). 281–309.10.1177/014272379801805403Search in Google Scholar
Shirai, Yasuhiro. 2000. The semantics of the Japanese imperfective -teiru: An integrative approach. Journal of Pragmatics 32(3). 327–361.10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00051-XSearch in Google Scholar
Shirai, Yasuhiro. 2007. The Aspect Hypothesis, the comparative fallacy and the validity of obligatory context analysis: A reply to Lardiere, 2003. Second Language Research 23(1). 51–64.10.1177/0267658307071602Search in Google Scholar
Shirai, Yasuhiro. 2009. Temporality in first and second language acquisition. In Wolfgang Klein & Li Ping (eds.), The expression of time, 167–193. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110199031.167Search in Google Scholar
Shirai, Yasuhiro. 2010. Semantic bias and morphological regularity in the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: What is the relation? Linguistics 48. 171–194.10.1515/ling.2010.005Search in Google Scholar
Shirai, Yasuhiro. 2013. Defining and coding data: Lexical aspect in L2 studies. In Rafael M. Salaberry & Llorenç Comajoan (eds.), Research design and methodology in studies on L2 tense and aspect, 271–308. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9781934078167.271Search in Google Scholar
Shirai, Yasuhiro & Roger W. Andersen. 1995. The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: A prototype account. Language 71(4). 743–761.10.2307/415743Search in Google Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen & Simona Montanari. 2008. The acquisition of ser, estar (and be) by a Spanish–English bilingual child: The early stages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 11(3). 341–360.10.1017/S136672890800357XSearch in Google Scholar
Smith, Carlota S. 1997. The parameter of aspect, 2nd edn. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.10.1007/978-94-011-5606-6Search in Google Scholar
Starren, Marianne. 2001. The second time: The acquisition of temporality in Dutch and French as a second language. Utrecht, the Netherlands: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics.Search in Google Scholar
Stockwell, Robert P., J. Donald Bowen & John W. Martin. 1965. The grammatical structures of English and Spanish. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Stoll, Sabine. 1998. The role of aktionsart in the acquisition of Russian aspect. First Language 18(54). 351–377.10.1177/014272379801805405Search in Google Scholar
Strik, Nelleke & Ana T. Pérez-Leroux. 2011. Jij doe wat girafe?: Wh-movement and inversion in Dutch-French bilingual children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1(2). 175–205.10.1075/lab.1.2.03strSearch in Google Scholar
Vendler, Zeno. 1957. Verbs and times. Philosophical Review 66(2). 143–160.10.2307/2182371Search in Google Scholar
Wong, Vivian C.-I. 2009. The role of adult input on the usage of Cantonese aspect markers in young Cantonese-speaking children. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong BA thesis.Search in Google Scholar
Yip, Virginia & Stephen Matthews. 2000. Syntactic transfer in a Cantonese-English bilingual child. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3(3). 193–208.10.1017/S136672890000033XSearch in Google Scholar
Yip, Virginia & Stephen Matthews. 2007. The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. s: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511620744Search in Google Scholar
Appendix
Procedure for coding verbs
Read a small subset of discourse until you are reasonably sure about the interpretation of the sentence(s) being coded.
Determine if repetition is involved, and code as either UNITARY, ITERATIVE, HABITUAL, or ITERATIVE-HABITUAL following the criteria below:
Criteria for iterativity
The criterion for iterativity is simply whether the situation referred to is a single unitary state/event/process, or not. For example, He coughed once at noon yesterday, he sang for a few minutes yesterday and he loved Mary are coded as UNITARY, while he coughed for a few minutes is coded as non-unitary (i. e., repeated) in that there is repetition of the action of coughing. There are three subcategories for ‘REPEATED’ (see examples below).
UnitaryHe coughed once at noon yesterday.
Repeated(a) IterativeHe coughed for a few minutes.
(b) HabitualHe walked to school for a month.
(c) Iterative-habitualHe coughed for a few minutes every day.
As defined in Brinton (1988), iterative “portrays actions repeated on the sameoccasion,” while habitual “portrays actions repeated on different occasions” (p. 54).The category iterative-habitual is to represent actions that are repeated not only onmultiple occasions but also on each of these occasions
Remove grammatical aspect/tense from the sentence, and then apply Steps 1 to 4 to determine its lexical aspect.
Operational tests for coding lexical aspect in Cantonese
Step 1: State or nonstate (Nondynamic vs. Dynamic)
Does ‘X singjat VP’ (=’X often VP’) have a habitual interpretation?
– If no → state (e. g., *Ngo singjat oi nei ‘I always/often love you’ → no habitual reading)
– If yes → nonstate (e. g., Ngo singjat sik faan ‘I often eat rice’
→ habitual reading → Go to Step 2
Step 2: Punctual or durative
(b) Can you say ‘X i VP jyun’ (=‘X finish VP-ing’) without an iterative interpretation?
– If you cannot → Achievement (e. g., #Keoi i sei jyun’he finished dying’) or semelfactive (e. g., Keoi kat jyn ‘he finishd coughing) → Go to step 4.
– If you can → Accomplishment (e. g., Keoi se jyun jat fung seon ‘he finished writing a letter’) or
Activity (e. g., Keoi i paau jyun bou ‘he finished running’) → Go to Step 3
Step 3: Accomplishment or Activity/semelfactive (Telic vs. atelic)
(a) Can ‘X cadi VP zo’ (= ‘X almost VP’) mean ‘X started V but did not complete it’?
– If it can → Accomplishment (e. g., Keoi cadi paau dou hokhau’Lit: he almost run arrive
school’ (he almost ran to the school) can mean that he started running but he didn’t reach the school).
– If it cannot → Activity (e. g., *Keoii cadi paau zo bou ‘he almost ran’ (he
almost ran)) → Go to Step 4.
Step 4: Activity or Semelfactive
Can you say ‘X haidou VP’ with iterative/repetitive (i. e., iteration on one occasion. Not habitual)
interpretation?
– If you can → Semelfactive (e. g., Keoi haidou kat ’ (he is coughing))
– If you cannot → Activity (e. g., Keoi haidou paau bou ‘he is running’)
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
