Subject realization in Cantonese-English bilingual children

Abstract

This thesis investigates subject realization in Cantonese-English bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) children and sequential bilingual children who acquire English as their L2 in the local context. While monolingual children need to coordinate syntax and discourse pragmatics to make an appropriate choice of subjects, Cantonese-English bilingual children have to overcome more challenges to attain language-specific grammaticality. Studies of bilingual acquisition of subjects help understand how children confront the conflicting input of two typologically unrelated languages. As proposed by the structural overlap theory, the grammatical domain of subjects lies at the interface between syntax and pragmatics and is susceptible to cross-linguistic influence. Given the contact between Cantonese and English, it is hypothesized that overt subjects being obligatorily realized in English will result in an overuse of subjects in Cantonese which licenses both overt and null subjects. While cross-linguistic influence in the domain of subjects has been much studied in Indo-European languages, scanty works have considered Cantonese-English bilinguals. Therefore, this research explores the acquisition of this language dyad with a focus on how subjects are realized by bilingual children. To bridge the gap of some earlier works involving only one language of bilingual children, this study covers the acquisition of two linguistic systems for a thorough review of a grammatical domain. 12 locally-born BFLA participants and 20 sequential bilinguals (aged 5 to 10) performed a narrative elicitation task using the wordless picture story Frog, where are you? as a prompt. The transcribed data in CHAT format were compared with English monolingual controls selected from the CHILDES database. Cantonese data of BFLA participants and sequential bilinguals were compared separately to examine whether bidirectional transfer occurred due to different stages of dual language input. Quantitative analysis showed significant differences among the three groups of children and their subject choices in English. An overuse of overt lexical subjects by BFLA children and sequential bilingual children was observed in both English and Cantonese data, when compared with monolinguals and sample narratives from parents. Qualitative analysis of the transcripts revealed interlanguage patterns in bilingual children’s English which were modelled on Cantonese existential sentences and serial verb constructions. The findings provide support to the structural overlap theory in predicting the occurrence of cross-linguistic influence in subject realization. The data also indicate the importance of the dominance pattern as a language external factor to predict the directionality of transfer. Under the current investigation, results of subject realization are found to be affected by the story-telling task and children’s development of discourse pragmatics.