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Bilingual children's production of regular and irregular past tense morphology*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2014

JUDITH RISPENS  and
ELISE DE BREE
JUDITH RISPENS*
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
ELISE DE BREE
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
*
Address for correspondence: Judith Rispens, University of Amsterdam, Department of General Linguistics, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam, the NetherlandsJ.E.Rispens@uva.nl
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Abstract

This study examined the production of the Dutch past tense in Dutch–Hebrew bilingual children and investigated the effect of type of past tense allomorph (de versus te) and token frequency on productions of the past tense. Seven-year-old bilingual children (n=11) were compared with monolingual children: age-matched (n=30) and younger vocabulary-matched (n=21). Accuracy of regular and novel past tense was similar for the bilingual and monolingual groups, but the former group was worse on irregular past tense than the age-matched monolingual peers. All three groups showed effects of type frequency: te past tenses were more accurate than de. The difference between the bilingual and monolingual children surfaces in the extent of the effect: for the bilingual children it was most pronounced in verbs with low token frequency and novel verbs. Results are interpreted as stemming from a learning strategy or from phonological transfer from the Hebrew morphosyntactic system.

Keywords

bilingualismpast tense morphologymorphophonologyDutch
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Special Issue 2: L3 Acquisition: A Focus on Cognitive Approaches , April 2015 , pp. 290 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

The authors would like to thank Marlize Visser for her help with the data collection of the Dutch–Hebrew children, and all children for their participation. We are grateful for the comments of three anonymous reviewers on an earlier draft of this paper.

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