O'Brien, Beth A.

Syntax is a core component of linguistic knowledge, and a key diagnostic index for difficulty in language development. For bilingual children, the language systems that they learn may be more or less contrastive in their syntactic features. The languages learned by the bilingual children in the current study, English and Chinese, differ in several important syntactic properties (e.g., marking of mass-count distinction and tense/aspect features). Therefore, their development in terms of grammatical knowledge may differ from that reported for monolinguals.
In this exploratory study, we focus on linguistic features that are relevant to the age group of the participants, and that are also important for their literacy development and academic performance. Thus, of interest is the general level of syntactic complexity of children's Chinese, their grasp of specific morphosyntactic features, and how their background variables (e.g., relative language dominance) might affect their syntactic knowledge. To address the research questions, this study focuses on data collected through an expressive language task for Mandarin Chinese at the entry of primary school.