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Yip and Matthews ’ latest book makes a welcome new contribution to an expanding body of literature on first language acquisition in bilingual contexts. Their starting point is the presently well-established view according to which the... more
Yip and Matthews ’ latest book makes a welcome new contribution to an expanding body of literature on first language acquisition in bilingual contexts. Their starting point is the presently well-established view according to which the bilingual child’s languages con-stitute separate systems. The past decade has witnessed an intense debate over whether the two linguistic systems, although separate in principle, may nevertheless interact. Yip and Matthews provide substantial empirical evidence in favour of this view, arguing that bilingual children develop differently from monolinguals. Moreover, they show that many developmental phenomena in bilingual data are paralleled by similar features in contact varieties, such as Singapore Colloquial English (SCE), and they argue that bilin-gual acquisition can have the effect of establishing substrate influence in a contact lan-guage. In particular, mutual influence occurring in bilingual development – so goes the hypothesis – provides one me...
Previous neuroimaging research indicates that English verbs and nouns are represented in frontal and posterior brain regions, respectively. For Chinese monolinguals, however, nouns and verbs are found to be associated with a wide range of... more
Previous neuroimaging research indicates that English verbs and nouns are represented in frontal and posterior brain regions, respectively. For Chinese monolinguals, however, nouns and verbs are found to be associated with a wide range of overlapping areas without significant differences in neural signatures. This different pattern of findings led us to ask the question of where nouns and verbs of two different languages are represented in various areas in the brain in Chinese–English bilinguals. In this study, we utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a lexical decision paradigm involving Chinese and English verbs and nouns to address this question. We found that while Chinese nouns and verbs involved activation of common brain areas, the processing of English verbs engaged many more regions than did the processing of English nouns. Specifically, compared to English nouns, English verb presentation was associated with stronger activation of the left putamen and c...
Recent research has identified language development in school-age heritage children as an important yet missing link between child early bilinguals and adult heritage speakers. This study investigates the Mandarin ba-construction... more
Recent research has identified language development in school-age heritage children as an important yet missing link between child early bilinguals and adult heritage speakers. This study investigates the Mandarin ba-construction ([(NP1)-ba-NP2-VP]) through elicited narration among heritage Mandarin children (n = 27, aged 4–14) and their parents (n = 18) in the UK. The results showed considerable similarities between the children and their parents in a number of key structural properties of the ba-construction. However, the children produced the ba-construction with reduced frequency and in a “heritage variety” with a reduced set of nominal and verbal phrases in NP2 and VP, which is not attested in a group of age-matched Mandarin speakers in Beijing. Additionally, higher frequency of the ba-construction in the heritage children’s production is associated with greater lexical diversity, rather than higher frequency of the ba-construction, in their parental input. We lay out positive ...
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This study investigates L2 comprehension of focus-to-accentuation mapping in English sentences with focus particle only by advanced learners of English whose L1 was either Cantonese or Dutch. Two experiments were conducted to examine (a)... more
This study investigates L2 comprehension of focus-to-accentuation mapping in English sentences with focus particle only by advanced learners of English whose L1 was either Cantonese or Dutch. Two experiments were conducted to examine (a) whether L2 learners could map accentuation to focus; and (b) whether they could perceive accentuation in English sentences. Results show that accentuation played little role in Cantonese learners’ comprehension of focus, whereas it affected how accurately and quickly Dutch learners and native controls comprehended focus. Dutch learners were even more efficient than native controls in comprehending focus-to-accentuation mapping. Furthermore, both L2 groups could successfully perceive accentuation in English sentences. These findings suggest that multiple interfaces might not be equally problematic for L2 learners with different L1s, and convergence at multiple interfaces in L2 is possible. The comprehension difficulty observed in Cantonese learners c...
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This study reports a production experiment investigating the realization of objects with different verb types in controlled discourse contexts in 68 three- to seven-year-old sequential Cantonese–English bilingual children. The results... more
This study reports a production experiment investigating the realization of objects with different verb types in controlled discourse contexts in 68 three- to seven-year-old sequential Cantonese–English bilingual children. The results show the bilingual children behaved similarly to the Cantonese monolingual peers in object omission, but exhibited protracted development and produced target-deviant forms following a Cantonese pattern in omitting objects specified in prior discourse in English. The bilingual children also showed non-target-like uses of the Cantonese post-verbal object pronoun keoi5, which were unattested in monolingual children. Our findings show evidence for bidirectional cross-linguistic influence: the direction of influence goes from the weaker to the stronger language and from the stronger to the weaker language. Vulnerability of object realization in bilingual acquisition can be better understood in terms of the interaction between cross-linguistic influence, inp...
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This paper examines the close parallels between the contact phenomena in Cantonese-English bilingual children and Southeast Asian creoles, especially in the domain of perfective aspect marking. ‘Already’ is a cross-linguistically common... more
This paper examines the close parallels between the contact phenomena in Cantonese-English bilingual children and Southeast Asian creoles, especially in the domain of perfective aspect marking. ‘Already’ is a cross-linguistically common lexical source of perfective aspect markers given its conceptual link with the sense of perfectivity. In contact scenarios involving a European lexifier and Southeast Asian substrates, the development of ‘already’ into a perfective marker is further triggered by the incompatibility between the verbal morphology of the former and the isolating typology of the latter. Adopting an ecological approach to language transmission and creole genesis we discuss how the transient grammaticalization phenomena in the bilingual children can be compared to decreolization, and how the study of bilingual acquisition can contribute to contact linguistics. Despite the prevalence of unpredictable factors in contact scenarios, we argue that bilingual children can still s...
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This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children's knowledge of event semantics in interpreting spatial modifiers with zai 'at' after a posture verb or before a placement verb. The event-semantic principles investigated... more
This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children's knowledge of event semantics in interpreting spatial modifiers with zai 'at' after a posture verb or before a placement verb. The event-semantic principles investigated include subevent modification (Parsons, 1990) and aspect shift (Fong, 1997). We conducted an experimental study using modified forced choice, video choice, and elicited production techniques with five groups of children (two- to six-year-olds) and an adult control group. Three-year-olds were sensitive to the ambiguity of zai-PPs with placement verbs and posture verbs, suggesting guidance from principles of aspect shift and subevent modification. On the other hand, distributional properties of the input play a role in acquiring the interpretation and word order of zai: e.g., four-year-olds significantly differed from adults in accepting non-target V-zai sentences, as some verb classes can take postverbal prepositional phrases with zai while others cannot...
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Abstract:This article features a new multimedia corpus with 22 hours of recordings of a Mandarin-speaking child from the age of 1;7 to 3;4. We review the state of the art in the use of corpora for first language acquisition of Mandarin,... more
Abstract:This article features a new multimedia corpus with 22 hours of recordings of a Mandarin-speaking child from the age of 1;7 to 3;4. We review the state of the art in the use of corpora for first language acquisition of Mandarin, and highlight the importance of corpus studies in evaluating children's language developmental patterns vis-a-vis adult input. The transcripts in our new corpus are annotated with a morphological tier indicating parts of speech, and linked to audio or video files. This corpus goes beyond existing published corpora of child Mandarin in having more data for a single child, as well as media linking. It contributes to a number of fields including language acquisition, Chinese linguistics, corpus linguistics, developmental psycholinguistics, education, and speech and language therapy.Abstract:
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Whether relative clauses can be identified in Chinese is a recurrent question. We ask whether relative clauses are distinct from other noun-modifying clause constructions in Cantonese, one of many East Asian languages in which a noun can... more
Whether relative clauses can be identified in Chinese is a recurrent question. We ask whether relative clauses are distinct from other noun-modifying clause constructions in Cantonese, one of many East Asian languages in which a noun can be preceded by a diverse range of modifying clauses. The relationship between head noun and modifying clause may be a grammatical one, with the head noun being understood as an argument or an adjunct of the modifying clause; or its interpretation may be dependent on semantic and pragmatic factors. We conclude that Cantonese has a General Noun-Modifying Clause Construction as proposed for Japanese (Matsumoto et al., this volume), with relative clauses forming a subset of modifying clauses in which a grammatical relation obtains.
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This paper examines the emergence of perfective aspect in Cantonese-English bilingual children from the perspective of contact-induced grammaticalization, focusing on the novel use of already. Although the adverbial already seems to serve... more
This paper examines the emergence of perfective aspect in Cantonese-English bilingual children from the perspective of contact-induced grammaticalization, focusing on the novel use of already. Although the adverbial already seems to serve a function similar to that of the Cantonese perfective marker zo2 in the bilingual children, other model constructions suggest that the function of already may combine those of several Cantonese particles such as the sentence-final particle laa3. The results suggest that in contact-induced grammaticalization, it is possible to develop a new category in the replica language based on multiple different but related categories in the model language. Adopting an evolutionary approach to language transmission (Mufwene, 2001), we discuss why grammaticalization in the Cantonese-English bilingual children does not seem to involve coevolution of form and meaning, why the grammaticalization phenomena in the bilingual children are only transient, and how the s...
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This contribution reports on the acquisition of reflexive binding, specifically, the interpretation of himself/herself by Cantonese learners of English. The study investigated transfer effects in general, and in particular the proposal of... more
This contribution reports on the acquisition of reflexive binding, specifically, the interpretation of himself/herself by Cantonese learners of English. The study investigated transfer effects in general, and in particular the proposal of Yuan (1994; see also Lakshmanan and Teranishi 1994) that successful acquisition of second-language (L2) binding properties might be explained in terms of similar properties instantiated in learners' native languages (NL). This view we term the Positive Transfer hypothesis. In order to investigate this hypothesis, we ...
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The emergence of perfective aspect in Cantonese-English bilingual children is examined from the perspective of contact-induced grammaticalization, focusing on the novel use of already to mark perfective aspect. While this function... more
The emergence of perfective aspect in Cantonese-English bilingual children is examined from the perspective of contact-induced grammaticalization, focusing on the novel use of already to mark perfective aspect. While this function resembles that of the Cantonese perfective marker, other model constructions suggest that the function of already may combine those of several Cantonese particles. The results suggest that a new category in the replica language may be based on multiple different but related categories in the model language. Adopting an ecology-based approach, we discuss how the study of bilingual acquisition can contribute to contact linguistics.
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We discuss three typological characteristics relevant to the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Cantonese and Mandarin: (i) the prenominal position of RCs; (ii) the availability of an internally-headed analysis for Cantonese object... more
We discuss three typological characteristics relevant to the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Cantonese and Mandarin: (i) the prenominal position of RCs; (ii) the availability of an internally-headed analysis for Cantonese object RCs; and (iii) Chinese RCs as a subset of noun modifying constructions (NMCs). Acquisition studies suggest that Chinese differs from languages with post-nominal RCs, which show a robust advantage for subject-gapped over object-gapped RCs. For Cantonese, some studies suggest an object advantage, which may be explained by the surface identity of object RCs and SVO main clauses and/or the internally-headed analysis. Finally, Chinese RCs can be analyzed as a subset of NMCs in which a modifying clause is attached to the head noun based on semantic-pragmatic relations.
It is widely acknowledged that developments in bilingual individuals parallel, and ultimately underlie, those taking place in the course of contact-induced change. In this paper we address the poorly understood relationship between the... more
It is widely acknowledged that developments in bilingual individuals parallel, and ultimately underlie, those taking place in the course of contact-induced change. In this paper we address the poorly understood relationship between the individual and community-level processes, focusing on the process of grammaticalization in circumstances of language contact and the corresponding developmental processes in bilingual acquisition. The phenomena chosen for discussion are drawn from Singapore Colloquial English (SCE) and from the Hong Kong Bilingual Corpus (Yip & Matthews 2000, 2007). Parallel developments in SCE and bilingual acquisition are analysed as cases of contact-induced grammaticalization as defined by Heine and Kuteva (2003; 2005), with some modifications. The emergence of already as a marker of aspect presents a case of ‘ordinary’ contact-induced grammaticalization, while the development of grammatical functions of give represents a case of replica grammaticalization. One implication of these findings is that bilingual first language acquisition is a possible route for substrate influence, both in general and specifically in the development of contact languages such as pidgins and creoles.
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Research Interests: Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Ecology, German, French, and 11 moreItalian, Processing, Eve, Man, Code Switching, Transfer, Topicalization, Asynchrony, Syntactic, Qi, and Bloom
Research Interests: Developmental Psychology, German, Bootstrapping, Transparency, Li, and 11 moreEve, Transfer, Gene, Acceleration, Split, Dominance, Topicalization, Multiple, Asynchrony, Syntactic, and Bloom
CUHK Sir. ...
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This paper investigates the development of English relative clauses in two bilingual children exposed to Cantonese and English from birth. The two subjects are siblings both of whom show dominance of Cantonese over English in their... more
This paper investigates the development of English relative clauses in two bilingual children exposed to Cantonese and English from birth. The two subjects are siblings both of whom show dominance of Cantonese over English in their preschool years. Aspects of their English show features and structures that are quite unlike their monolingual counterparts, many of which are attributable to transfer from the dominant language, in this case Cantonese. One of the most striking Cantonese-based features observed in the first ...