BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Production and processing of tense morphology in English successiv
 e bilingual children - Vicky Chondrogianni\, School of Psychology and Clin
 ical Language Sciences\, University of Reading
DTSTART:20081118T160000Z
DTEND:20081118T173000Z
UID:TALK14895@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Susan Rolfe
DESCRIPTION:Inflectional morphology is a notoriously vulnerable area in (a
 dult) L2 acquisition. Problems in morphological realization have been attr
 ibuted by current L2 acquisition theories either to output problems relate
 d to the overt realization of the grammatical morphemes (Missing Surface I
 nflection Hypothesis\, Haznedar & Schwartz\, 1997\; Lardiere\, 1998\, 2008
 \; Prevost & White\, 2000) or to deficiencies of the underlying syntactic 
 representations (Failed Functional Features Hypothesis\, Hawkins & Chan\, 
 1997\; Tsimpli\, 2003). \n\nTo date most studies addressing the issue of L
 2 morphological competence have primarily focused on production data by ad
 ult L2 learners. Little research on child L2 acquisition has shown that L2
  children do have problems with the overt realization of grammatical morph
 emes (Haznedar\, 2001\; Ionin & Wexler\, 2002\; Paradis\, 2005)\, with ult
 imate target-like performance not always being possible (Blom & Polišenš
 ka\, 2006). Studies on off-line comprehension and on-line processing have 
 shown that L2 children are capable of comprehending a morpheme\, when this
  is also overtly realized in production (Grüter\, 2005) and of processing
  L2 morphemes in the same way as L1 children (Marinis\, 2007).  \n\nThe cu
 rrent paper presents preliminary findings from a production and a processi
 ng task targeting tense morphemes in English by child L2 learners. Twenty 
 one 6-to-8 year-old Turkish-English successive bilingual children and thir
 ty four monolingual controls matched on age and socio-economic status were
  assessed on production with the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment TEGI
  by Rice & Wexler (2001) that elicits 3rd person singular –s\, regular a
 nd irregular past tense. Children’s processing of tense morphology was e
 xamined via a word-monitoring task targeting children’s sensitivity to g
 rammatical and ungrammatical sentences containing 3rd person singular –s
 \, past tense –ed and progressive –ing.  \n\nResults from the producti
 on task showed that overall L2 children were significantly less accurate t
 han controls in both past tense (L2=86%\, L1=94%) and 3rd person singular 
 –s (L2=76%\, L1=93%). In the past tense\, an effect for regularity was f
 ound with L2 children being significantly less accurate than L1 children i
 n both regular (L2=90%\, L1=96%) and irregular (L2=22%\, L1=86%) verbs\, a
 nd showing significantly more instances of overregularisations (L2=70%\, L
 1=35%). Despite the lower accuracy of the L2 children on the production ta
 sk\, results from the on line task revealed that both L1 and L2 children w
 ere good at detecting the ungrammaticality in the case of morpheme omissio
 n\, exhibiting slower reaction times in the ungrammatical than the grammat
 ical conditions (L1: –s 418ms vs. 477ms\, -ed 473ms vs. 495ms\, -ing 498
 ms vs. 548ms\; L2: –s 620ms vs. 761ms\, -ed 653ms vs. 737ms\, -ing 743ms
  vs. 890ms). These results suggest that despite output problems\, L2 child
 ren are capable of processing grammatical morphemes in real time.\n
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR