TY  - JOUR
A1  - Clahsen, Harald
A1  - Jessen, Anna
T1  - Do bilingual children lag behind? A study of morphological encoding using ERPs
JF  - Journal of child language
N2  - The current study investigates how bilingual children encode and produce morphologically complex words. We employed a silent-production-plus-delayed-vocalization paradigm in which event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during silent encoding of inflected words which were subsequently cued to be overtly produced. The bilingual children's spoken responses and their ERPs were compared to previous datasets from monolingual children on the same task. We found an enhanced negativity for regular relative to irregular forms during silent production in both bilingual children's languages, replicating the ERP effect previously obtained from monolingual children. Nevertheless, the bilingual children produced more morphological errors (viz. over-regularizations) than monolingual children. We conclude that mechanisms of morphological encoding (as measured by ERPs) are parallel for bilingual and monolingual children, and that the increased over-regularization rates are due to their reduced exposure to each of the two languages (relative to monolingual children).
KW  - morphology
KW  - event-related brain potentials
KW  - bilingualism
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000919000321
SN  - 0305-0009
SN  - 1469-7602
VL  - 46
IS  - 5
SP  - 955
EP  - 979
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - New York
ER  -