Grammatical gender-marking ability of multilingual children in French immersion

• Autores: Klaudia Krenca, Kathleen Hipfner-Boucher, Xi Chen
• Localización: International Journal of Bilingualism: interdisciplinary studies of multilingual behaviour, ISSN 1367-0069, Vol. 24, Nº. 5-6, 2020, págs. 968-983
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:

    We explored the advantage of bilingualism and the effect of linguistic proximity on the acquisition of determiner-noun agreement, an aspect of inflectional morphology, in a French immersion setting. To our knowledge, third language acquisition literature has yet to provide evidence of a bilingual advantage in learning a particular feature of morphology in an additional language among young children.

    Design/methodology/approach:

    We compared accuracy in determiner-noun agreement on a narrative task in three groups of grade 1 and 2 students (n = 15 in each group): a group of third language French learners whose first language marked gender, a group of third language French learners whose first language did not mark gender, and a group of English learners learning French as a second language.

    Data and analysis:

    If the determiner and the noun agreed in gender, gender on the determiner was considered correct. A repeated measures factorial ANCOVA was carried out to compare the performance among the three language groups on the proportion of correctly marked masculine and feminine nouns.

    Findings/conclusions:

    All of the children achieved high levels of accuracy on masculine nouns with no difference among the three language groups on the proportion of correctly marked masculine nouns. There was a significant difference in the proportion of correctly marked feminine nouns in favour of the group whose first language marks gender compared to the other two groups.

    Originality:

    The current study supports transfer in the domain of morphology among primary-school-aged children (who are first language speakers of diverse minority languages) in the early stages of third-language French acquisition.

    Significance/implications:

    This finding provides preliminary evidence of a bilingual advantage in the domain of morphology among young, emergent trilinguals whose first language and third language share gender marking as a linguistic feature, supporting the linguistic proximity model.