Morphosyntactic Development in First Generation Arabic—English Children: The Effect of Cognitive, Age, and Input Factors over Time and across Languages

Abstract

This longitudinal study examined morphosyntactic development in the heritage Arabic-L1 and English-L2 of first-generation Syrian refugee children (mean age = 9.5; range = 6–13) within their first three years in Canada. Morphosyntactic abilities were measured using sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) in English and Syrian Arabic that included diverse morphosyntactic structures. Direct measures of verbal and non-verbal cognitive skills were obtained, and a parent questionnaire provided the age at L2 acquisition onset (AOA) and input variables. We found the following: Dominance in the L1 was evident at both time periods, regardless of AOA, and growth in bilingual abilities was found over time. Cognitive skills accounted for substantial variance in SRT scores in both languages and at both times. An older AOA was associated with superior SRT scores at Time−1 for both languages, but at Time-2, older AOA only contributed to superior SRT scores in Arabic. Using the L2 with siblings gave a boost to English at Time−1 but had a negative effect on Arabic at Time-2. We conclude that first-generation children show strong heritage-L1 maintenance early on, and individual differences in cognitive skills have stable effects on morphosyntax in both languages over time, but age and input factors have differential effects on each language and over time.