Sensitivity to morphophonological cues in monolingual and bilingual children: evidence from a nonword task

Effects of age of onset in the second language have received an increasing amount of attention in recent years in bilingualism research (Montrul, 2008). While it is becoming clear that in several linguistic domains bilingual children do not perform as monolinguals, it has also become clear that considerable variation is related to the age of onset in the second language, and the subsequent exposure to that language. Kovelman, Baker, and Petitto (2008), for example, have shown that children with an age of onset of three or below are able to attain native-like performance in phonological and in reading tasks in primary school, while children with a later age of onset may lag behind way beyond the first stages of schooling. The present study aims at investigating the role of age of onset in the acquisition of inflectional morphology. More specifically, this study examines the sensitivity to morphophonological cues in a group of Czech-English primary school bilingual children with varying ages of onset of exposure in English. Sensitivity to bound morphemes is examined using a nonword task, in order to isolate morphophonological effects from semantic and lexical effects. Since it is well attested that bilingual children have smaller lexica than monolingual children do (Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang, 2010), the use of nonwords is an attempt to control for item-familiarity confounds and focus on the actual processing of morphophonology. In other words, this study aims at offering some answers to the following questions: Are bilingual children sensitive to morphophonological cues? Is their performance comparable to that of monolingual children? Does age of onset of exposure in the second language modulate the result?