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Psycholinguistic Approaches to Production and Comprehension in Bilingual Adults and Children
Edited by Leigh B. Fernandez, Kalliopi Katsika, Maialen Iraola Azpiroz and Shanley E.M. Allen
[Benjamins Current Topics 117] 2021
► pp. 187–210

Basque-Spanish bilingual children’s expressive and receptive grammatical abilities

 | Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language
ORCID logo | Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language
 | Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language
Expressive-receptive gaps in lexical abilities have been documented for bilingual children, but few studies have investigated whether a similar gap is observed at the grammatical level. The current study assessed grammatical abilities through sentence production and comprehension tasks in both languages in 17 Basque-Spanish simultaneous bilingual 6- through 9-year-olds (both languages acquired before three years of age). The children scored lower in Basque than Spanish for sentence production, but no significant differences were found for sentence comprehension. While an expressive-receptive gap was found for both languages, this gap was larger in Basque than in Spanish. Object-verb agreement errors were especially prevalent in Basque production, possibly because verbs in Spanish only agree with the subject. These results demonstrate that expressive-receptive gaps are also observed in bilingual children’s grammatical abilities and may vary depending on the structural similarity between the two languages.
Keywords: bilingual language acquisition, expressive-receptive gap, verb inflection
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Expressive-receptive gaps in bilingual lexical development
    • 1.2Expressive-receptive gaps in bilingual grammatical development
    • 1.3Spanish and Basque
    • 1.4The current study
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Materials
      • 2.2.1Parent questionnaire
      • 2.2.2BEST
      • 2.2.3fLEX
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Error coding
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Expressive-receptive gap
    • 3.2Correlations with age and language exposure
    • 3.3Effects of argument structure and cross-linguistic similarity
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Expressive-receptive grammatical gap in Basque-Spanish bilingual children
    • 4.2The role of language exposure
    • 4.3The role of language similarity
    • 4.4Theoretical implications for studying production and comprehension
    • 4.5Practical implications
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 14 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.117.08and
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