How Syntax Awareness Affects Cross-Language Learning
Happy Lunar New Year! Let’s usher in the Year of the Dragon by learning how Chinese-English bilingual children learn both their languages.
In a bilingually diverse country such as Singapore, does having two different sets of syntax (or grammar) between dissimilar languages cause ‘confusion’, and is it detrimental in any way? Before getting into the nitty-gritty of things, however, perhaps a crash course (if you’re new to syntax)/refresher on syntax (if you have had previous experience) is in order.
Syntax: A Crash Course
All languages have specific rules on what words go where, and syntax refers to the order of words and phrases in a sentence. This includes topics such as subject-verb agreement, or where the direct object should be placed. By manipulating the order of words, nuances and meanings can also differ. Consider how the position of the word ‘only’ affects the meaning of the following sentences:
– Only I bake cake. → No one else bakes cake.
– I only bake cake. → I don’t do anything other than bake cake.
– I bake only cake. → I don’t bake anything aside from cake.
How then, do children acquire such complex rules, especially in languages where its morphosyntactic rules are very dissimilar?
The Transfer Facilitation Model
Consider English and Chinese. When it comes to basic word order structure, Chinese is thankfully relatively similar to English, with both sharing the canonical word order of Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). Examples include ‘小美(S)唱了(V)一首歌(O)’, and ‘Alice (S) sang (V) a song (O)’. This is important, as syntactic awareness greatly contributes to reading comprehension; children can use their word order knowledge to anticipate future information in their texts, or even infer the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Beyond SVO agreement, however, Chinese and English differ sharply, compared to say English and Italian, which are both alphabetic languages. Grammar in English typically involves word transformation (e.g., ‘-s’ or ‘-es’ is added to nouns to indicate plurality, cat – cats (= more than 1 cat), and ‘-d’ or ‘-ed’ is added to verbs to indicate past tense, walk – walked). Compared to this, grammar in Chinese involves adding additional accompanying characters to indicate plurality or past tense (e.g., ‘们’ is added to singular pronouns to show more than one person, and ‘了’ or ‘过’ is added to indicate past tense). Thus, both languages vastly differ in their morphosyntactic structure due to their different language families.
In relation to this, the Transfer Facilitation Model, proposed by Koda (2008), suggests that transfer and learning is more pronounced when target languages are structurally similar than when they are different. This makes sense, and this concept is helpfully put to the test by several researchers who tested two groups of P1 and P3 children in Hong Kong.
The Study
All participants received bilingual education in local primary schools, similar to Singapore. Participants were taught English (L2) as a second language, and were exposed to Chinese (L1, bear in mind, this likely means Cantonese, as the study was done in Hong Kong) since birth, according to parent reports. The study conducted was a longitudinal one, which meant that the children’s syntactic awareness in Chinese and English were assessed over time; once when the study began and another time 1 year later. Results from the study showed that L1-to-L2 syntactic transfer was mediated by L2 syntactic awareness but not L1 reading comprehension – this means that how much their first language (Chinese) assisted their understanding of their second language (English) was decided by how well they knew English grammar in the first place. Being able to comprehend sentences well in Chinese did not necessarily translate to a better understanding of English, due to the difference in their morphosyntactic structures. Word order awareness (recall subject-verb agreement) was more transfer-ready in supporting English reading comprehension, compared to morphosyntactic awareness. As such, bilingual learners needed to gain a minimum level of competence in their L2 before they could use L1 resources to facilitate L2 learning. From this, we can also infer that when we as children learn very different languages, our brains helpfully make connections wherever possible, while simultaneously retaining the different syntax rules for each language.
Application
Parents of Chinese-English bilingual children reading this, do not fret! Although cross-language transfer may be limited to some degree, syntactic awareness in both Chinese and English improved significantly after 1 year, by virtue of the exposure to the languages the children received. Thus, helping your child explore the features of each language – be it through conversation, books, or any other interactive media – is already a great boon for their comprehension abilities. The learning capacities of a child is a wondrous thing; after all, we have already been through it ourselves already.
This post was written by our intern Jieying, and edited by our Research Fellow Rui Qi.
Reference:
Siu, S. T.-S., & Ho, S. S.-H. (2020). A longitudinal investigation of syntactic awareness and reading comprehension in Chinese-English bilingual children. Learning and Instruction, 67, 101327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2020.101327