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Second language acquisition in 6- to 8-year-old native Spanish-speaking children : ERP studies of phonological awareness, semantics, and syntax

Författare

  • Annika Andersson

Summary, in English

Most people in the world and about a fifth of all school-aged Americans speak at

least two languages. Nevertheless, little is known about second language (L2) processing

in development, even though language proficiency is strongly related to success in almost

all domains. Whereas behavioral studies of L2 acquisition in children are abundant,

neurocognitive studies of L2 processing typically are limited to adults with several years

of exposure, who may use general cognitive mechanisms to compensate for any

difficulties in L2 processing.

Research on bilingual adults suggests that age of acquisition (AoA) and proficiency

have different effects on different aspects of L2 processing. The present study therefore

recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in order to index processes of phonological

awareness (Rhyming effect: RE), semantics (N400), and syntax (LAN, P600) in bilingual

and monolingual children 6-8 years of age. Even though behaviorally, bilingual children

with an average AoA of 4 years had lower English proficiency than monolingual children,

proficiency predicted similar differences in ERPs across groups: greater proficiency was

linked with shorter latencies and higher amplitudes of all ERP components. Latency in

these cases represents speed of processing while amplitude of ERP effects in children can

v

be thought of as an indication of detection of the introduced violations.

The appearance of the anterior rhyming effect, latency of the posterior rhyming

effect, along with the distribution of the anterior ERP effect for phrase structure

violations were related to AoA. More specifically, bilingual 6- to 8-year olds of higher

English proficiency processed rhyming nonwords slower than 3- to 5-year-old

monolingual children, which could have a strong impact on later vocabulary acquisition.

Differences across lingualism groups in distribution of the anterior negativity elicited by

phrase structure violations could indicate different neural generators for processing of

syntax. Noteworthy is that differences in processing as illustrated by these ERP effects

were recorded even though in both these cases bilingual children’s English proficiency

were within the normal range expected of monolingual children of similar age. Early

acquisition was thus important for processing of rhyming and for more automatic

syntactic processing as revealed by differences in the anterior negativity.

Publiceringsår

2012

Språk

Engelska

Dokumenttyp

Doktorsavhandling

Ämne

  • General Language Studies and Linguistics

Nyckelord

  • ERP
  • L2
  • language development
  • Semantics
  • phonological awareness
  • syntax
  • children (3-8 years of age)

Status

Published

Handledare

  • Dare Baldwin

Försvarsdatum

4 maj 2012

Försvarstid

09:00

Försvarsplats

University of Oregon

Opponent

  • Edward Vogel