The sentence repetition task is drawn from a standardized measure currently in development for Spanish–English school-age children. In the current study, we use sentence repetition with school-age children to explore the performance of Spanish–English bilinguals on English prepositions. Much of the literature available about prepositions in bilingual speakers focuses on younger children who speak English and Hebrew or Russian and Hebrew, using sentence repetition tasks ( Armon-Lotem, 2014 Armon-Lotem et al., 2008). Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – 5 ( Wiig, Semel & Secord, 2013), Preschool Language Scales – 5 ( Zimmerman, Steiner & Pond, 2011), the SPELT-3: Structured Photographic Expressive Language test ( Dawson, Stout, & Eyer, 2003), and the California Standards Test ( California Department of Education, 2008). Prepositions are often part of the standardized measures used in assessing the language abilities of children, e.g. In the TEKS document, comprehension and production of prepositions are identified as supporting the development of following oral and written directions and accurately describing object position in space. For example, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS Texas Education Agency, 2008) outlines important skills and the language knowledge to be attained by students in elementary school. The school curricula systematically increase in difficulty and language required for success. Further, understanding prepositions in English is important for bilingual children’s success in school, as these forms have the potential to impact reading, writing, and language used in the classroom. However, like grammatical morphemes, prepositions are distributed differently across languages, which may impact a bilingual child’s performance ( Armon-Lotem, 2014 Armon-Lotem, Danon & Walters, 2008). Prepositions are of interest because they have semantic content that builds on the shared conceptual representation of relationships between objects and events based on world experience. In the current study, we examine variables that may contribute to Spanish–English bilingual children’s knowledge of prepositions in English. Given that a child’s language input and output informs the child’s understanding of linguistic forms in each language, it is important to study how linguistic forms such as prepositions are learned. This highlights the need for bilinguals to both hear and use their languages to develop their linguistic skills. Researchers have documented that estimates of children’s current language input (the language children hear in their environment) and output (language use) account for up to 60% of the variance in young Spanish–English bilinguals’ language scores ( Bedore et al., 2012). The amount of language experience children have helps shape their knowledge in each of their languages ( Bohman, Bedore, Peña, Mendez-Perez & Gillam, 2010). When bilingual children enter school they may be exposed to and expected to use English at a higher rate to meet academic demands than what they are accustomed to at home, as not all families may use English in the home. Bilingual children have the same amount of access to world experiences (across their experiences in two cultures) as do their monolingual peers, but their language-specific knowledge differs because they may start to acquire their languages at different ages and because their day-to-day use of the language varies ( Bialystok, 2001 Grosjean, 2008 Kohnert, 2010). Because a bilingual’s language knowledge is distributed across two languages, learning of prepositions may be influenced by their exposure to each language. Across languages, the forms that prepositions take vary due to differences in how these words and relationships are encoded. These help individuals express ideas about time and space relationships. Prepositions are unique grammatical forms in that they have both semantic and syntactic qualities.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |