Emergent Use of English Grammatical Morphemes by Chinese-Speaking Children.

This longitudinal study examined the emergent use of major English grammatical morphemes by three six-year-old Chinese-speaking children learning English as a second language. Although Chinese is morphologically different from English (in that it has no articles, tense or plural inflections, or auxiliaries), articles (a/the) are among the first morphemes used correctly by the three children. This contrasts with the finding that articles are most difficult for Chinese-speaking adults to acquire. Morphemes that have similar linguistic representations in Chinese (in, on, and possessives) also emerged very early. A common developmental pattern is revealed among these three children in the emergent use of tense markers: Present and progressive markers are used first, future second, and past tense markers last. Third person singular verbs and plural nouns emerge relatively late. These findings suggest that Chinese-as-a-first-language plays a mixed role in the emergence of the grammatical morphemes of English when learned by children as a second language.