Wang Xuan, McMillen Stephanie, Shi Yan
Department of Linguistics, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, United States.
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, College of Arts and Sciences, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, United States.
Front Psychol. 2025 May 9;16:1566442. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1566442. eCollection 2025.
The present study aims to advance our understanding of bilingual children's L2 morpheme acquisition variability by examining the child-internal factor of L1 transfer, child-external factor of L2 exposure, as well as the linguistic factor of morphological salience.
Drawing on naturalistic conversational data from a corpus of bilingual children's language samples, we analyzed the production accuracy of five English inflectional morphemes in 21 language samples from Spanish-English bilingual children and 25 language samples from Mandarin-English bilingual children. The two groups were age-matched and gender-balanced, with a mean age of 5 years and 1 month (range: 3; 8-7; 5). Binomial logistic mixed-effects models were employed to examine the accuracy of L2 morpheme production as influenced by L1 transfer, L2 input quantity (months of English exposure), input quality (morphological richness & lexical diversity), and the morphological salience of the target morphemes.
The results revealed a significant effect of L1 transfer, with Spanish-English bilinguals demonstrating higher accuracy than Mandarin-English bilinguals, particularly for English plural -s and articles. Besides, months of English exposure emerged as a significant positive predictor of L2 morpheme production accuracy. As regards input quality, while lexical diversity positively contributed to morpheme accuracy in both groups, morphological richness negatively affected morpheme production accuracy among Mandarin-English bilinguals. In addition, our descriptive analyses of morphological salience factors indicate that, across both groups of children, perceptual salience, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category and semantic complexity influence morpheme production accuracy to different degrees.
The study suggests that L1 transfer plays a critical role in L2 English morpheme production accuracy and underscores the importance of L2 input quantity and quality, such as lexical diversity, in explaining variability in bilingual children's morpheme acquisition. Additionally, difficulties in producing English morphemes may be associated with factors related to morphological salience. Overall, the findings underlie the importance of L1 transfer, L2 exposure, morphological salience in bilingual children's L2 morpheme acquisition.
本研究旨在通过考察第一语言迁移这一儿童内部因素、第二语言接触这一儿童外部因素以及形态显著性这一语言因素，增进我们对双语儿童第二语言语素习得变异性的理解。
利用来自双语儿童语言样本语料库的自然对话数据，我们分析了21个西班牙裔 - 英语双语儿童语言样本和25个汉语 - 英语双语儿童语言样本中五个英语屈折语素的产出准确性。两组年龄匹配且性别均衡，平均年龄为5岁1个月（范围：3;8 - 7;5）。采用二项逻辑混合效应模型来考察第一语言迁移、第二语言输入量（接触英语的月数）、输入质量（形态丰富度和词汇多样性）以及目标语素的形态显著性对第二语言语素产出准确性的影响。
结果显示第一语言迁移有显著影响，西班牙裔 - 英语双语者的准确性高于汉语 - 英语双语者，尤其是在英语复数 -s和冠词方面。此外，接触英语的月数是第二语言语素产出准确性的显著正向预测因子。至于输入质量，虽然词汇多样性对两组的语素准确性都有正向贡献，但形态丰富度对汉语 - 英语双语者的语素产出准确性有负面影响。此外，我们对形态显著性因素的描述性分析表明，在两组儿童中，感知显著性、形态音位规则性、句法类别和语义复杂性对语素产出准确性有不同程度的影响。
该研究表明第一语言迁移在第二语言英语语素产出准确性中起关键作用，并强调了第二语言输入量和质量（如词汇多样性）在解释双语儿童语素习得变异性方面的重要性。此外，英语语素产出困难可能与形态显著性相关因素有关。总体而言，这些发现凸显了第一语言迁移、第二语言接触、形态显著性在双语儿童第二语言语素习得中的重要性。
