Monolingual and bilingual children's production of complex syntactic structures

Area of Science:

• Child Language Acquisition
• Bilingualism
• Developmental Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Bilingual children often show lower scores than monolinguals on standardized tests.
• Naturalistic language assessments can reveal comparable performance in some areas.
• Complex syntax production is a key area of language development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate complex syntax production in simultaneous French-English bilingual children.
• To compare bilinguals with age-matched monolingual peers using structured and spontaneous measures.
• To identify factors influencing complex syntax acquisition in bilinguals.

Main Methods:

• Simultaneous French-English bilingual children and monolingual peers were assessed.
• Structured language tasks were used to measure complex syntax.
• Spontaneous language samples were collected and analyzed.
• Predictors of complex syntax production were examined for each group.

Main Results:

• Bilingual children surprisingly scored higher than monolinguals on the structured complex syntax task.
• No significant group differences were observed in spontaneous complex syntax production.
• Predictors of complex syntax varied between bilingual and monolingual groups and across tasks.
• This contrasts with other language domains where bilingual development may appear protracted.

Conclusions:

• Simultaneous bilingual children may exhibit a relative strength in complex syntax acquisition.
• Syntactic knowledge transfer between languages could facilitate this development.
• Language exposure differences may impact syntax less than other language subdomains.