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Acquiring Regular and Irregular Past Tense Morphemes in English and French: Evidence From Bilingual Children

It is possible that bilingual children's development is not simply delayed relative to monolingual children's. They might show interaction effects from crosslinguistic frequency variables and within‐language exposure‐time variables. The present study was based on the assumption that bilingual children are simply delayed. Bilingual children may not be disadvantaged but since both languages are acquired at the same time, it becomes more challenging to develop a vocabulary in both languages rather than monolinguistic speakers. However, a longitudinal study of both monolingual and bilingual children would test if that assumption is warranted. Nicoladis claims that a second possible difference between bilingual and monolingual children concerns rate of development—in other words, whether bilingual children might be generally slower to learn each language because they have two languages to learn in the same amount of time that monolinguals have one (Paradis & Genesee, 1996). Because of the heterogeneity of child bilinguals, there are few studies that can address the possibility that young bilinguals might be delayed in language acquisition (see the discussion in Genesee & Nicoladis, 2007). Nicoladis also found that bilingualism doesn’t necessarily lead to delays in morphosyntactic acquisition.