Noun Phrases in Koda Bimodal Bilingual Acquisition
English and ASL
For child and adult bilinguals, both languages are always activated (Kroll et al. 2006),
and therefore, the languages may interact with each other in numerous ways, including the
phenomena known as cross-language influence, code-switching, and code-blending. We have
been building a model in which these phenomena are essentially non-distinct, and simply fall out
from the architecture of the language faculty as instances of what we call ‘language synthesis’
(Figure 1).
In this presentation, we support this view of language synthesis by examining Noun
Phases produced by koda bimodal bilinguals, hearing children with deaf parents, simultaneously
acquiring a sign language (American Sign Language (ASL) or Brazilian Sign Language (Libras))
and a spoken language (English or Brazilian Portuguese (BP)). We examine the use of
determiners in the spoken languages and the ordering of nouns and adjectives in both the spoken
and sign languages in two types of data: longitudinal spontaneous production from three
children ages 2;00-3;01, and elicited production from a larger group of 4- to 7-year-olds .
Libras and ASL are different from BP and English (respectively) in not requiring an overt
determiner in most NP contexts. Despite the prevalence of determiners in the spoken languages,
monolingual two-year-old children omit them in required contexts, but the rate of ungrammatical
omission quickly declines (especially in BP, as in other Romance languages; Lopes 2006;
Demuth & McCullough 2009). If the bimodal bilingual children in our study are using
determinerless structures from their signed languages in their spoken languages, it might be
expected that they would persist in the non-target use of noun phrases with article omission past
the age at which such usage disappears for monolingual children, and/or to a larger extent during
the typical omission period. Indeed, this is what we found. Table 1 shows the proportion of nonadult-like (NAL) DPs for each child, and of those, the proportion of errors due to missing or
incorrect articles (*art); see examples in (1). We have also observed determiner omission
continuing into the fifth year, and in adult code-blending contexts (2).
A different finding emerged from our study of adjective placement (3). Libras and
English are strict in the placement of adjectives after or before nouns, respectively. BP
occasionally permits prenominal adjectives, and ASL more freely allows postnominal ones. Thus,
if the children show synthesis in this domain, we might expect to see prenominal adjectives in
Libras, and more likely, postnominal ones in English. However, we did not find this usage, even
though the US children did occasionally use post-nominal adjectives (appropriately) in their ASL.
The contrast between domains where influence is found (determiners) and those where it
is not found (adjective placement) allows us to refine the details of our synthesis model. In
particular, the post-nominal placement of adjectives in ASL must involve a syntactic structure
which is incompatible with the English DP; whereas the use of null determiners is sure
compatible, as they are found in both English and BP for mass nouns and generics.
487 words
Figure 1. Bilingual language architecture
(1)
(2)
Child
Age
#Utts
#DPs
NAL
*art
BEN
2;003;00
617
344
.57
.93
TOM
2;013;01
694
252
.38
.78
IGOR
2;012;11
1657
690
.15
.68
Table 1. Results of longitudinal analysis
a. Igor, 3;01
Libras: IX(revista)
BLUE
BP: vamo brincar azul
Let’s play blue
Let’s play with the blue (card).
b. Ben, 2;00
ASL:
TRUCK IX(truck-book)
Engl: I want truck
a. Lex, 4;03
Eng:
b. Tom, 4;07
Eng:
I’m scary skeleton
we’re looking for key
I want the truck book
Libras (n=10) 1.00 0.00 4 5 6 7 Age Group Portuguese (n=8) Proportion Proportion (3) Experimental data
1.00 0.00 4 5 7 English (n=23) 100% 100% 0% 0% 5 6 Age Group Noun‐Adj Age Group ASL (n=16) 4 Adj‐Noun 7 Noun‐Adj 4 5 6 7‐8 Age Group Adj‐Noun References
Kroll, J., Bobb, S. & Wodniecka, Z. (2006) Language selectivity is the exception, not the rule. Bilingualism:
Language and Cognition 9, 119-135. Demuth, K. & McCullough, E. (2009) The prosodic (re-)organization of
children’s early English articles. Journal of Child Language 36, 173-200. Lopes, R. E. V. (2006) Bare nouns and DP
number agreement in the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese. In N. Sagarra & A.J. Toribio (Eds.), Selected
Proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, 252-262. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.