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Influence of Second Language Cherokee Immersion on Children's Development of Past Tense in Their First Language, English
Author(s) -
HirataEdds Tracy
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9922.2011.00655.x
Subject(s) - cherokee , linguistics , psychology , past tense , sentence , imitation , social psychology , philosophy , verb
Metalinguistic skills may develop differently in multilingual and monolingual children. This study investigated effects of immersion in Cherokee as a second language on young children's (4;5–6;1) skills of noticing morphological forms/patterns in English, their first language, by comparing English past tense skills on two nonword and two real‐word tasks between a Cherokee immersion group ( N = 10) and an English‐medium comparison group ( N = 13). Only past finiteness (irregular forms plus overregularizations) on a real‐word sentence imitation task was significantly different, with the Cherokee group performing better. The children learning Cherokee as a second language were progressing as well as their monolingual peers on English past tense marking and in one area had developed increased attention to productive morphological patterns.