Understanding (un)grammaticality in context: Evidence from young Spanish-English bilinguals over time

Area of Science:

• Child language acquisition
• Bilingualism
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Percent grammatical utterances (PGU) is a key measure for assessing children's grammatical skills.
• Further research is needed to understand PGU in bilingual populations and its relation to other language measures.
• Bilingual language development presents unique challenges and patterns compared to monolingual development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine changes in Spanish and English PGU in bilingual preschoolers over one year.
• To investigate associations between PGU and other language sample measures within and across languages.
• To identify and analyze grammatical error patterns in Spanish and English.

Main Methods:

• Play-based language samples were collected from 19 Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers.
• PGU and other language sample measures were calculated at the beginning and end of the preschool year.
• Changes in PGU, correlations between measures, and error patterns were analyzed.

Main Results:

• English PGU significantly increased over the year and correlated with other English language measures.
• Spanish PGU showed no significant increase and did not correlate with other Spanish measures.
• Observed grammatical error patterns reflected language-specific differences.

Conclusions:

• Bilingual children exhibit distinct developmental trajectories for their first and second languages.
• English language development showed positive associations, while Spanish showed disassociations over time.
• Grammatical error analysis provides insights into bilingual children's acquisition of language structures, with clinical implications for Spanish-English bilinguals.