Similarities and Differences Between Simultaneous and Successive Bilingual Children: Acquisition of Japanese Morphology
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International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature E-ISSN: 2200-3452 & P-ISSN: 2200-3592 www.ijalel.aiac.org.au Similarities and Differences between Simultaneous and Successive Bilingual Children: Acquisition of Japanese Morphology Yuki Itani-Adams1, Junko Iwasaki2, Satomi Kawaguchi3* 1ANU College of Asia & the Pacific, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia 2School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University, 2 Bradford Street, Mt Lawley WA 6050, Australia 3School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Bullecourt Ave, Milperra NSW 2214, Australia Corresponding Author: Satomi Kawaguchi , E-mail: [email protected] ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history This paper compares the acquisition of Japanese morphology of two bilingual children who had Received: June 14, 2017 different types of exposure to Japanese language in Australia: a simultaneous bilingual child Accepted: August 14, 2017 who had exposure to both Japanese and English from birth, and a successive bilingual child Published: December 01, 2017 who did not have regular exposure to Japanese until he was six years and three months old. The comparison is carried out using Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann 1998, 2005) as a Volume: 6 Issue: 7 common framework, and the corpus for this study consists of the naturally spoken production Special Issue on Language & Literature of these two Australian children. The results show that both children went through the same Advance access: September 2017 developmental path in their acquisition of the Japanese morphological structures, indicating that the same processing mechanisms are at work for both types of language acquisition. However, Conflicts of interest: None the results indicate that there are some differences between the two children, including the rate Funding: None of acquisition, and the kinds of verbal morphemes acquired. The results of this study add further insight to an ongoing debate in the field of bilingual language acquisition: whether simultaneous bilingual children develop their language like a first language or like a second language. Key words: Simultaneous Bilingual Language Acquisition, Successive Language Acquisition, Japanese Morphology, Processability Theory INTRODUCTION Schlyter (1993), however, points out that such resem- Do children who acquire more than one language simultane- blance between bilingual and monolingual children was ously from birth develop each language like monolingual first found when a comparison was made using the data from language (L1) learners, or like second language (L2) learners? so-called balanced bilinguals. Not all simultaneous bilingual This question has drawn much attention in the field of simulta- children develop to be a balanced bilingual. This notion of neous bilingual language acquisition. Past studies have found balance between the two languages has led to the notion of that the two languages of simultaneous bilingual children can ‘stronger’ and ‘weaker’ languages. There is a debate about indeed be acquired independently from each other, like two first what the term ‘balance’ refers to in the context of the devel- languages (e.g., De Houwer 1990, 1995, 2005, 2009 for sum- opment of two languages (see Meisel 2004 and 2007 for dis- mary of past research; Lanza 1997; Meisel 1990, 2001; Mishi- cussion) and how to determine the balance between two lan- na-Mori 2002; Paradis & Genesee 1996). These studies have guages. In the existing literature (e.g. Schlyter 1993; Döpke concluded that simultaneous bilingual children develop their 1996; Jisa 2000) balance is often defined by the comparison languages like L1, based on the following findings: (1) simul- of the mean length of utterance (MLU) values of the two taneous bilingual children differentiate the two languages from languages against the child’s age; the language possessing a very early on, through use of the appropriate language in a spe- lower MLU at the same age is labeled the ‘weaker’ language. cific language context; (2) no systematic transfer of linguistic Schlyter (1993) and Schlyter and Håkansson (1994) in- properties from one language to the other was demonstrated; vestigated how Swedish-French bilingual children developed (3) based on findings that bilingual children did not show any their weaker language (Swedish). The verb-second (V2) delay or acceleration in timing of acquisition of certain gram- word order of Swedish was the structure examined in both matical structures compared to the L1 children, simultaneous studies.1 Schlyter (1993) concludes “the stronger language bilingual children follow the same developmental paths as the of a bilingual child is exactly like a normal first language in L1 children in terms of morphology and syntax. The findings monolingual children, whereas the weaker language in these from these studies support the Separate Development Hypoth- respects has similarities with a second language” (p. 305). esis (SDH) proposed by De Houwer (1990). This is also supported by Schlyter and Håkansson (1994). Published by Australian International Academic Centre PTY.LTD. Copyright (c) the author(s). This is an open access article under CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.6n.7p.268 Similarities and Differences between Simultaneous and Successive Bilingual Children: Acquisition of Japanese Morphology 269 Döpke (1996) re-examined the nature of the develop- description of PT to the acquisition of Japanese morphology ment of the weaker language (German) of bilingual children (Di Biase & Kawaguchi 2002) as below. acquiring German and English from birth. She found that The theory incorporates the hierarchy of processing while their German showed some similarities to German procedures described in Levelt’s (1989) speech production L1, it also showed variations that did not occur in L1 data. model, and proposes the universal hierarchy of the acqui- Furthermore, these variations were similar to some of the sition of the procedural skills required for each processing phenomena occurring in German L2 acquisition. From this, procedure. PT posits that for a language learner, these pro- Döpke (1996) argues that the weaker language of bilingual cessing procedural skills will be acquired in the following children is unlike either L1 or L2, but rather creates “a bridge sequence, from Stage 1 to Stage 5, forming a hierarchy, and between L1 and L2” (p. 18). Other researchers (e.g., Hulk & that each level of the hierarchy is a prerequisite for the next Müller 2000; Yip & Matthews 2000, 2007) also present sim- level (Pienemann 1998). ilar phenomena in the bilingual children they studied with (1) Stage 1: Word/lemma access; different language combinations. Stage 2: Category procedure; The above-mentioned studies compared data from dif- Stage 3: Phrasal procedure; ferent studies that investigate the acquisition of the same Stage 4: S-procedure; language. There are a number of methodological issues to Stage 5: The subordinate clause procedure, if appli- be considered when comparing results from different stud- cable (from Di Biase & Kawaguchi 2002) ies. As pointed out by Håkansson (2005), the “differences PT explains morphological structures for each process- in theoretical paradigms, views on what counts as reliable ing procedure in terms of the exchange of grammatical in- data, acquisition criteria and which linguistic areas to mea- formation, based on Lexical Functional Grammar’s (LFG) sure” (p.179) make comparisons between different types of (Bresnan 2001) notion of feature unification. Each process- acquisition a complex task. Further past studies compared ing procedural skill allows a specific type of information linguistic representation by bilingual children to other types exchange between lexicons. Below we explain the types of of language acquisition, and used them as evidence to dif- information exchange required for each stage by presenting ferentiate between different types of language acquisition. Japanese developmental schedule. These studies did not search for evidence in terms of the lan- Japanese is a SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language. Jap- guage acquisition process. anese word order is flexible; however, verbs are required to Our study addresses the issue of the nature of bilingual be placed in the final position in both the main and subordi- language development, focusing on the relationships be- nate clauses (Shibatani 1990). Japanese uses post-nominal tween the simultaneous bilingual and L2. We compare the particles to encode the grammatical or semantic functions development of Japanese morphology between a balanced of arguments, such as the nominative (NOM) marker –ga simultaneous bilingual child and a successive bilingual child to mark the grammatical role SUBJ(ect), the accusative who acquired Japanese as L2. The first child in this study (ACC) marker –o to marks OBJ(ect). An example of use of received Japanese input from birth, together with English, post-nominal particles is given below in (2). in a one-parent one-language environment (Döpke 1992). Japanese verbs are composed of a combination of stem This child developed her two languages in a balanced man- and agglutinative morphemes. The verb stem never occurs ner. The second child received his Japanese input sequential- on its own. In other words, it is always suffixed by at least ly to his English L1, starting from age 6;03 (six years and one morpheme. For example, the past