Sentence Repetition Performance Differences in Bilingual and Monolingual Children

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Education

Background:

• Understanding syntactic knowledge differences in children is crucial for effective language education.
• Bilingualism's impact on second language acquisition, particularly English syntax, requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare English syntactic knowledge across monolingual, early bilingual, and late bilingual elementary students.
• To identify specific linguistic features (sentence length, type, phrases, word type) that differentiate these language groups.

Main Methods:

• A sentence repetition task was administered to fourth and sixth graders across three groups: monolinguals, early (simultaneous) bilinguals, and late (sequential) bilinguals.
• Performance was analyzed based on sentence length, active/passive voice, noun/verb/prepositional phrases, and content/function words.

Main Results:

• Early bilinguals' performance was comparable to monolinguals, with a tendency to recall more content words in longer sentences.
• Late bilinguals demonstrated significantly lower accuracy across all analyzed linguistic features compared to both monolinguals and early bilinguals.
• Group differences were more pronounced for passive sentences and prepositional phrases.

Conclusions:

• Syntactic development varies significantly among monolingual, early bilingual, and late bilingual learners.
• Specific areas, such as passive voice and prepositional phrases, present greater challenges for late bilinguals.
• Findings underscore the need for tailored instructional strategies to support English language learners, particularly late bilinguals, in developing English syntactic proficiency.