Vocabulary And Morphology Development In Infant Trilinguals: Case Study

Abstract

The paper presents a case study exploring a trilingual family with parents speaking two different languages and living in a third language country and their children — heterogeneous twins acquiring three languages: English and Russian since the birth and German starting from the age of 1;11. From the very beginning, the ‘one parent — one language principle’ has been applied. The types of bilingualism in relation to the multilingual situation, the family background, the status of the languages in the family, the differences of English, Russian and German grammatical systems, and the order of morpheme acquisition in the three languages are considered. The morphological development of trilingual children exhibits similarities in the order of acquisition of certain morphological forms with both monolingual and bilingual children together with variation in the pace of development of the grammatical categories. The first productive morpheme to appear in the speech of the twins was the English plural -s. In the development of morphology, a cross-linguistic effect was at work with interaction of the three languages observed during the developmental process. The occurrence of cross-linguistic influence in trilingual language development is determined by both language-external and language-internal factors.

Keywords: Trilingualismvocabularymorphology developmentheterogeneous twins

Introduction

For last two decades, the interest in multilingualism has increased considerably giving growth to the research in the field of a third or additional language acquisition. Studies of children acquiring more than two languages cover different periods, but many of them start their analysis around at the age of two when children begin using multiword utterances. The majority of such studies are longitudinal case studies on a range of different participants and languages, which employ different methods of data collection and analysis.

Grammatical development is inextricably linked to the expansion and qualitative changes in the lexicon. Any language learning starts with attaining its vocabulary, a set of words that are the basic building blocks used in the generation and understanding of sentences. The growth of vocabulary is one of the essential prerequisites for language acquisition.

In this context, the aim of the paper is to present a study on the vocabulary and morphology acquisition of early trilingual twins simultaneously exposed to English, Russian from birth and German since the age of 1;11.

The study focuses on exploring the trilingual family — parents, who speak two different languages and live in a third language country and their children — to explore the question how children acquire the three languages involved. In order to understand the process of early trilingual acquisition it is necessary to consider the following issues: the types of bilingualism in relation to a multilingual situation, the family background, the status of the languages in the family, the differences of English, Russian and German grammatical systems, the order of morpheme acquisition.

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Problem Statement

In order to understand trilingualism, it is necessary to imagine what is going on inside a brain where the three languages coexist. In the view of Cook (Cook, 1995, p. 94) “a single mind with more than one language has a totality that is very different from a mind with a single language” and Cook characterizes the language capacities of such mind as “multi-competence”. The languages in a multi-competent individual may develop as separate systems, but the common features between them cannot be overlooked, and Cook suggests that such minds may have a flexible grammar rather than the single fixed grammar suggested by the Universal grammar approach to language acquisition.

Due to lack of research findings, the phenomena of trilingual and multilingual language acquisition are often explained from the point of view of what is known about the early bilingual acquisition. In many cases, trilingualism is described as an extension of bilingualism (Hoffmann, 1985; Hoffmann, 2001).

The most notable of the early studies on early bilingual development are those of Ronjat (Ronjat, 1913) and Leopold (Leopold, 1939–1949). The authors wrote critical works about their children who acquired two languages simultaneously from the very beginning of their speech. The study of Ronjat (Ronjat, 1913) covers the period of language development of his French/German bilingual son up to the age of 4 - 10 and deals with the case of complete bilingualism. Ronjat was the first to apply the “one person — one language” method. His son learned German from his mother and French from his father. Summarizing the results, Ronjat concluded that bilingualism did not lead to backwardness in speech. His son’s pronunciation from the very beginning was similar to that of a monolingual child in both languages. The parallel development of phonetics, morphology, and syntax took place in both languages.

The most thorough research on early bilingual development was conducted by professional linguist Leopold (1939–1949). The great advantages of this work are that it was written with the systematic use of a phonetic transcription and took into account the fact that the child forgot many words. The diary for Leopold’s daughter Hildegard goes to the age of 15; 7 but the first two years were paid the most attention. The two languages learned by the girl were English (the family lived in America) and German (the father’s language). In comparison with Ronjat’s case, the bilingualism was not complete because the position of Hildegard’s German was much weaker than that of her English. As Leopold reported, in the first two years of his daughter’s life bilingualism was prominent in vocabulary, in which German and English words were mixed. After the age of two, the girl began to separate the languages from each other according to the person in the conversation. Later on, due to much influence of one language on the other in vocabulary, idioms, and syntax; very little interference was observed in sounds, morphology, and word formation. The girl’s German was strongly handicapped.

In 1978, Volterra and Taeschner published a study on two Italian/German bilingual girls in which it was claimed that initially the two languages formed one system before eventually becoming differentiated. This issue dominated research in the field of bilingualism throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s as researchers sought evidence of either single or differentiated systems in bilingual subjects. It coincided with a relation that cases of the bilingual acquisition were not uncommon, and the study of these cases could provide insights into a language not found in monolingual research. Nowadays research into bilingual acquisition is a flourishing field, primarily focused on how cross-linguistic evidence can contribute to understanding of the language acquisition process.

Very recently, there has been some growth in studies on the acquisition of a third language (usually English), in relation to educational context, as English and multilingualism have become increasingly important as a result of globalization (Cenoz, Hefeisen, & Jessner, 2000; Cenoz, 2001). However there is little published work on the increasing number of children who are growing up multilingual at home as a result of increased mobility between countries and more mixed marriages.

Research Questions

Moving to the study, we plan to answer the following questions:

• Do the terms of language acquisition in trilingual children differ from monolingual children speaking the same languages?

• How does trilingual vocabulary develop?

• Does the language with rich inflection system affect the acquisition of less inflected languages?

Can the order of morphemes acquisition be determined?

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of the study is to investigate and describe the peculiarities of simultaneous acquisition of three languages by heterosexual twins.

Research Methods

Findings

Figure 01 shows the general vocabulary growth of the twins from the appearance of the first word to first phrases. The vertical axis shows the total number of acquired words; the horizontal axis indicates the age in months, when the growth of the children’s vocabulary was registered.

It is clearly seen that regardless the same environment and input the rate of the twins’ vocabulary development differs significantly. At the age of two, Anna’s total active vocabulary counted 215 words while Alex used only 70. The difference in the twins’ vocabulary acquisition was noticeable at the age of 1.5 and in a year the distance was considerable. Anna started to produce phrases ( Ja pojmyla juki (I washed hands); It’s icky ). Alex speech was telegraphic ( maljot itit (plane fly), no bed, all gone). The boy was a lot slower in acquiring new words and rules than his sister. His vocabulary items were very short and worse articulated.

At the age of two, the boy almost stopped speaking for some time. He refused to learn new words and used the words he already knew. This phenomenon, “the period of silence” after the child’s entering kindergarten experts have described as a necessary transitional phase. The silence of the child does not mean that he/she is out of the language, ignores it, but is passively watching. In fact, at this time he/she is very active doing a massive inner work. The child collects experiences in the new language, checks, summarizes representations. Parents are concerned about the child’s silence at this time. In their view, a new language is always attained as a foreign language at school: perception — exercise — use. However, multilingual children, having met in the kindergarten with a second (third) language are in a different situation — “immersion”. The child meets a new language alone and should do all the work by himself (Gvozdev, 1961). It would be wrong to conclude that multilingualism caused Alex's slow vocabulary development. Many studies on infant monolinguals and bilinguals report that either twins or boys develop their linguistic skills later than girls or an only child in the family do. Besides, brain hemisphere dominance (Alex turned out to be left-handed) and peculiarities of the boy’s temperament might affect the rate of vocabulary acquisition.

The ratio of the twin’s languages demonstrates the amazing clear numerical superiority of more sophisticated Russian words. Alex could say more than 40 Russian words, only 16 English and 18 German words (Figure 02 ). Anna produced 138 Russian, 77 English and 22 German words. Her total vocabulary corresponds to that of a monolingual child. The dominance of Russian words can be explained by the “strength” of the mother’s language during this period of life. For two years the mother took care of her children by herself without anybody’s assistance, the amount of the Russian input was larger than English.

Before going to a kindergarten, the twins’ vocabulary consisted mainly of Russian and English (the parents’ languages) words. German words occasionally appeared because of communication with peers. The period of going to kindergarten checked with the beginning of rapid vocabulary growth.

Anna’s words denoting feelings, evaluations of others and relationships were multiple. Alex had a relatively high proportion of words meaning vehicles and actions with them. For example, a car, which shook the boy’s imagination, named for the first time in Russian ( masina ) was deposited in the memory (although the word consists of three syllables) for a long time, not giving way to simpler English car and German Auto .

Researchers in the field of bilingualism discovered a scheme of the child’s entering the languages (Volterra & Taeschner, 1978). In the first year or two of life, the child associates each object or action with a word in one or another language forming a mixed vocabulary of words in both languages that he uses in conversations with both parents. That is bilingual kids use two languages as one. The “father’s” and “mother’s” words are interchangeable. One could say they are perceived as monolingual synonyms. Only later children become aware of their bilingualism and language separation begins. Thus, bilingual children go through three stages: 1) the stage of mixed lexicon, 2) the stage of translation equivalents, when children begin to distinguish their parents’ languages and 3) the stage of complete differentiation of the languages. Anna and Alex initially utilized “common language.” Translation equivalents were very few. By the age of 25 months Anna attained more Russian-English translation equivalents, mostly nouns ( sobaka =dog; shar =ballon; lesepet =tricycle), Alex — English-German ( mehr =more, meine =my; nicht =no). The first word mixing was fixed at the age of 2.5 ( Anja-Kind (Anna-child) Teddy-Bar (teddy bear)).

The grammatical forms observed in the speech of the twins are listed below:

(1)

Russian:

Plural forms( taminy (vitamins), staniki (trousers))

Imperatives(Stavaj (Get up!), Zakoj! (Close!))

Accusative case( Daj kuku ! (Give the doll!)

Past tense( ja nashaa , ja pojmyja (I found, I washed)

English:

Plural -s(socks, undies, shoes)

Contracted copula( It’s icky!)

Possessive case( Daddy’s shoes on! )

German:

Imperatives ( Kom hier! (Come here!))

Present tense 3^rd person singular ( Mama arbeitet (Mother works)

Numerals ( eiit, zwei, drei (one, two, three))

Adverbs( weg (away), mehr (more), auch (also))

These grammatical forms coincide with certain stages of morphology development reported by researchers. It can be only concluded that the first productive morpheme to appear in the speech of the twins was the English plural -s, as it was often applied to different nouns in the obligatory contexts. Another interesting observation deals with the effect of the Russian rich morphology on the acquisition of English and German grammatical forms in the girl. Anna began producing correct Russian and English grammatical sentences early, which seem to facilitate German grammar attainment.

In general, the analysis has shown that multilingualism does not impair speech development at early stages. The morphological development of trilingual children exhibits similarities in the order of acquisition of certain morphological forms both with monolingual and bilingual children together with variation in the speed of development of the grammatical categories.

Conclusion

Early trilingual development is a complex process involving unique combinations of factors and situations. There are many types of trilinguals: children growing up in a trilingual environment, adults living in a trilingual or multilingual community, and fluent bilinguals who have learned a third language at school or for other reasons. Most of trilinguals do not have much choice of whether they wish to be trilingual; it is simply a fact of their particular circumstances. How they deal with three languages is interesting in that the three languages cannot be 'balanced' or equal, as they can be in a bilingual person. To be sure, some level of interference from one or two languages may be expected, but there is little research to indicate a distinct pattern of language selection or usage. Many theories on bilingualism simply cannot be transferred to trilingualism. A great deal of research has been carried out on bilinguals, but relatively little on trilinguals. This is because comparative testing or longitudinal studies are difficult to undertake in two languages, and it is even more difficult for three languages, as it is hard to find a sample of trilinguals who use the same three languages at the same competence levels and who have similar backgrounds. In this situation, researchers, on the one hand, should work at the unification of the conceptual apparatus, and on the other hand, present a comprehensive look at the problem of multilingualism describing internal and external factors affecting the process of language acquisition. .

References

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