Cover not available

In:Psycholinguistic Approaches to Production and Comprehension in Bilingual Adults and Children
Edited by Leigh B. Fernandez, Kalliopi Katsika, Maialen Iraola Azpiroz and Shanley E.M. Allen
[Benjamins Current Topics 117] 2021
► pp. 99–126

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Investigating vulnerabilities in grammatical processing of bilinguals

Insights from Basque-Spanish adults and children

 | Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language | Université de Montréal | IKER UMR-5478
 | Université de Montréal | IKER UMR-5478 | Université Bordeaux-Montaigne
 | University of Oslo
Published online: 14 July 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.117.05pou
Abstract
Bilinguals show a large gap in their expressive-receptive abilities, in both languages. To date, most studies have examined lexical processing. The current study aimed to assess comprehension and production of verb agreement, i.e., grammatical processing, in bilinguals, and to examine the factors that might modulate them: exposure, age and language-specific morphological complexity. Twenty balanced Basque-Spanish bilinguals (10 adults and 10 children) were assessed on comprehension and production of subject-verb agreement in both languages and object-verb agreement in Basque. Twenty age-matched Spanish-dominant Basque-Spanish bilinguals were assessed in Spanish only. The results revealed a consistent gap in Basque in both children and adults, with an advantage for comprehension. In Spanish, a gap appeared in children only, with an advantage for production. The gap size did not vary with the amount of language exposure but with age and morphological complexity, suggesting that these factors modulate bilinguals’ grammatical processing.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Gap between comprehension and production in the language processing of bilinguals
    • 1.2Grammatical processing of verbs in production and comprehension
    • 1.3Gap in grammatical processing of verbs in bilinguals: The current study
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Tasks
      • 2.2.1Stimuli
      • 2.2.2Sentence production task
      • 2.2.3Sentence comprehension task
    • 2.3Procedure
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Data pre-processing
    • 3.2Subject-verb agreement in Basque and Spanish
      • 3.2.1Overall results on comprehension and production performance
      • 3.2.2Role of exposure, age and morphological complexity on the gap size
    • 3.3Object-verb agreement in Basque
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Role of exposure (subject-verb processing in Spanish and Basque)
    • 4.2Role of age (adults and children)
    • 4.3Morphological complexity
      • 4.3.1Subject-verb agreement
      • 4.3.2Object-verb agreement
  • 5.Limitations of the study
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
References (39)
References
Anderson, Giezen, & Pourquié, (this issue). Basque-Spanish bilingual children’s expressive and receptive grammatical abilities. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Special Issue on Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children.
Armon-Lotem, S., de Jong, J., & Meir, N. (2015). Assessing multilingual children disentangling bilingualism from language impairment. Bristol; Buffalo: Multilingual Matters. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bastiaanse, R. (2008). Production of verbs in base position by Dutch agrammatic speakers: Inflection versus finiteness. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 21(2), 104–119. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bastiaanse, R., Rispens, J., Ruigendijk, E., Rabadán, O. J., & Thompson, C. K. (2002). Verbs: Some properties and their consequences for agrammatic Broca’s aphasia. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 15(3–5), 239–264. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bates, D. M., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–40. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ben Zeev, S. The influence of bilingualism on cognitive strategy and cognitive development. Child Development, 48, 1009–1018.
Blom, E., Vasić, N., & de Jong, J.. (2014). Production and Processing of Subject – Verb Agreement in Monolingual Dutch Children With Specific Language Impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 57(3), 952–965. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bohman, T. M., Bedore, L. M., Peña, E. D., Mendez-Perez, A., & Gillam, R. B. (2010). What you hear and what you say: Language performance in Spanish – English bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13(3), 325–344. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Department of Education, Language Policy and Culture of the Basque Government and Sociolinguistics cluster (2013). Arrue Project. Retrieved from [URL]
Finn, A. S., Kalra, P. B., Goetz, C., Leonard, J. A., Sheridan, M. A., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2016). Developmental dissociation between the maturation of procedural memory and declarative memory. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 142, 212–220. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Franck, J., Cronel-Ohayon, S., Chillier, L., Frauenfelder, U. H., Hamann, C., Rizzi, L., & Zesiger, P. (2004). Normal and pathological development of subject – verb agreement in speech production: a study on French children. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 17, 147–180. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Franco, L. (2014). The lexical/functional divide in aphasic production: poorly studied aphasic syndromes and theoretical morpho-syntax: a collection of case studies in Italian. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gershkoff-Stowe, L., & Hahn, E. R. (2013). Word comprehension and production asymmetries in children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114, 489–509. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gibson, T. A., Oller, D. K., Jarmulowicz, L., & Ethington, C. A. (2012). The receptive – expressive gap in the vocabulary of young second-language learners: Robustness and possible mechanisms. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(1), 102–116. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gibson, T. A., Peña, E. D., & Bedore, L. M. (2014). The receptive – expressive gap in bilingual children with and without primary language impairment. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 23(4), 655–667. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., Cera, C., & Sandoval, T. C. (2008). More use almost always means a smaller frequency effect: Aging, bilingualism, and the weaker links hypothesis. Journal of Memory and Language, 58(3), 787–814. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gollan, T. H., Slattery, T. J., Goldenberg, D., Van Assche, E., Duyck, W., & Rayner, K. (2011). Frequency drives lexical access in reading but not in speaking: The frequency-lag hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140(2), 186. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hsin, L., Culbertson, J., Barrière, I., Nazzi, T., & Legendre, G. (2014). Revealing early comprehension of subject – verb agreement in Spanish. In Boston University Language Development Conference 38 Proceedings (pp. 158–70). Retrieved from [URL]
Hualde, J. I., & Ortiz de Urbina, J. (eds.). (2003). A grammar of Basque. Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hualde, J. I., & Zuazo, K. (2007). The standardization of the Basque language. Language Problems and Language Planning, 31(2), 143–168. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Johnson, V. E., de Villiers, J. G., & Seymour, H. N. (2005). Agreement without understanding? The case of third person singular /s/. First Language, 25(3), 317–330. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Keller, K., Troesch, L. M., & Grob, A. (2015). A large receptive – expressive gap in bilingual children. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 10–3389. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lapointe, S. G. (1985). A theory of verb form use in the speech of agrammatic aphasics. Brain and Language, 24(1), 100–155. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Legendre, G., Culbertson, J., Zaroukian, E., Hsin, L., Barrière, I., & Nazzi, T. (2014). Is children’s comprehension of subject – verb agreement universally late? Comparative evidence from French, English, and Spanish. Lingua, 144, 21–39. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lenth, R. V. (2016). Least-Squares means: The R package lsmeans. Journal of Statistical Software, 69(1), 1–33. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leonard, L. B. (2014). Specific language impairment across languages. Child Development Perspectives, 8(1), 1–5. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Litcofsky, K. A., Tanner, D., & van Hell, J. G. (2016). Effects of language experience, use, and cognitive functioning on bilingual word production and comprehension. International Journal of Bilingualism, 20(6), 666–683. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oller, D. K., Pearson, B. Z., & Cobo-Lewis, A. B. (2007). Profile effects in early bilingual language and literacy. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28(2). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A. T. (2005). Number problems in children. In C. Gurski (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2005 Canadian Linguistic Association Annual Conference. London, Canada. Retrieved from [URL]
Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2014). Neural integration of language production and comprehension. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(43), 15291–15292. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
R Core Team. (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Retrieved from [URL]
Pourquié, M. (2013). Verb processing in Basque and French agrammatic aphasia: A ‘post-lexical access’ deficit. Aphasiology, Volume 27(12), 1472–1510. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2015). fLEX: Multilingual assessment of inFlectional and LEXical processing, Software, Intelectual property, 2016-01-88, Basque Government.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rothweiler, M., Chilla, S., & Clahsen, H. (2012). Subject – verb agreement in Specific Language Impairment: A study of monolingual and bilingual German-speaking children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(1), 39–57. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T. (2016). The declarative/procedural model: A neurobiological model of language learning, knowledge, and use. In G. Hickok & S. L. Small (Eds.), Neurobiology of language (pp. 953–968). San Diego: Academic Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Verhagen, J., & Blom, E. (2014). Asymmetries in the acquisition of subject – verb agreement in Dutch: Evidence from comprehension and production. First Language, 34(4), 315–335. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Waxman, S., Fu, X., Arunachalam, S., Leddon, E., Geraghty, K., & Song, H. (2013). Are nouns learned before verbs? Infants provide insight into a long-standing debate. Child Development Perspectives, 7(3), 155–159. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yan, S., & Nicoladis, E. (2009). Finding le mot juste: Differences between bilingual and monolingual children’s lexical access in comprehension and production. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(3), 323–335. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue