English Past Tense and Mandarin Chinese Perfective Aspect in Narratives by Singaporean Bilingual Kindergarten...

Difficulty with marking past tense verbs is a clinical indicator of language disorders. However, there is too little information on language development in bilingual children living in multilingual and multicultural countries like Singapore to accurately diagnose language disorders. In this study, we aimed to understand language development in Singaporean English-Mandarin bilingual children by examining narrative-level discourse.

We conducted secondary analysis of a large data set collected in Singapore. Here, we report on a total of 36 English-dominant and balanced English-Mandarin bilingual participants who produced narratives in English and Mandarin elicited via retell tasks using wordless picture books. Participants had been allocated to language dominance groups based on parental reports and performance on vocabulary tasks. We explored their productions of English regular and irregular past tense verb forms and Mandarin perfective aspect markers and examined the effect of language dominance on production of target forms.

There was no significant difference between the language dominance groups on any outcome measures. Participants produced significantly more irregular past tense verb forms than regular past tense markers in English. The percentage accuracy of regular and irregular past tense verb forms was positively correlated with English expressive vocabulary scores. There was no significant correlation between Mandarin perfective aspect markers and Mandarin vocabulary scores.

These findings suggest that acquisition of past tense marking in bilingual children is dependent on exposure to target verb forms. By providing normative data, these results can support clinical decision making around assessment and diagnosis of language disorders in linguistically complex communities in which there are limited standardized assessment tools normed on relevant populations.