Blom Elma, Bosma Evelyn
Utrecht University.
Fryske Akademy and University of Amsterdam.
J Child Lang. 2016 May;43(3):581-607. doi: 10.1017/S0305000915000574. Epub 2016 Feb 26.
In this study, age of onset (AoO) was investigated in five- and six-year-old bilingual Frisian-Dutch children. AoO to Dutch ranged between zero and four and had a positive effect on Dutch receptive vocabulary size, but hardly influenced the children's accurate use of Dutch inflection. The influence of AoO on vocabulary was more prominent than the influence of exposure. Regarding inflection, the reverse was found. Accuracy at using Frisian inflection emerged as a significant predictor; this transfer effect was modulated by lexical overlap between the two languages. This study shows that 'the sooner the better' does not necessarily hold for language development. In fact, for the correct use of inflection, it does not matter whether children start at age zero or four. For rapidly learning words in a new language it may be helpful to first build a substantial vocabulary in the first language before learning a new language.
在本研究中，对5岁和6岁的弗里斯兰语-荷兰语双语儿童的语言习得年龄（AoO）进行了调查。习得荷兰语的年龄在0到4岁之间，这对荷兰语接受性词汇量有积极影响，但对儿童准确使用荷兰语词形变化的影响不大。语言习得年龄对词汇的影响比对接触量的影响更为显著。关于词形变化，情况则相反。使用弗里斯兰语词形变化的准确性是一个显著的预测因素；这种迁移效应受到两种语言之间词汇重叠的调节。这项研究表明，“越早越好”并不一定适用于语言发展。事实上，对于正确使用词形变化来说，儿童是在0岁还是4岁开始学习并不重要。对于在一门新语言中快速学习单词而言，在学习新语言之前先在第一语言中积累大量词汇可能会有所帮助。
