Study of an older child's first language learned as the minority language in a bilingual setting

The literature on bilingualism and language change shows considerable evidence that simplification, reduction, restructuring and loss of linguistic systems in the first language (mother tongue) do occur on a large scale under certain conditions. The research reported here is the case study of a ten year old French/English bilingual child who, though exposed from birth to French through his mother and later (3:6) through his father, has developed a language that is not "native". The research consisted of two parts: an analysis of a spontaneous speech sample (8.25 hours of recordings taken over a five month period) and a "judgment of grammaticality" test to assess receptive knowledge.The results provided evidence of simplification and confluence with English in the areas of gender, word order, and verbs. Overall, the data showed a high degree of English mixing, with 40% of the total number of utterances containing some English. Additional analyses gave little evidence of an appropriate gender distinction. However, both the definite/indefinite and the singular/plural distinctions were well marked. There were simplified aspects of word order, some of which led to incorrect constructions. Simplification and reduction were also found in the verb system. However, the tense system seemed well-developed.Also characteristic of the child's French were unique constructions such as a verb constructions based on the French verb "faire" followed by an English verb ending in the progressive "ing" (e.g., "faire going") and constructions where the complimentizer "que" was deleted or replaced by "quoi". The results of the judgment of grammaticality test reflected the findings of the spontaneous speech data. The level of correct judgments for the grammatical sentences was excellent but the judgments for the ungrammatical sentences were highly selective. The detection of gender-based errors, word order errors which agreed with English structure, or verb conjugation errors was poor. The detection of verb tense errors and word order errors with no English confluence was excellent.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio