Why jumped is so difficult: tense/aspect marking in Mandarin–English bilingual children

Abstract

AbstractLearning to mark for tense in a second language is notoriously difficult for speakers of a tenseless language like Chinese. In this study we test two reasons for these difficulties in Chinese–English sequential bilingual children: (1) morphophonological transfer (i.e., avoidance of complex codas), and (2) interpretation of –ed as an aspect marker of completion, like the Mandarin –le. Mandarin–English bilingual children and age-matched monolinguals did a cartoon retell task. The verbs used in the stories were coded for accuracy in English, telicity, and suppliance of –ed or –le. The results were consistent with morphophonological transfer: the bilingual children were more accurate with irregular past forms in English than regular forms. The results were also consistent with the bilingual children's interpretation of –ed as an aspect marker: most of their production of –ed was on telic verbs. We discuss possible reasons for the children's interpretation of –ed as an aspect marker.