I gratefully acknowledge the thoughtful guidance, insight, and suggestions of my major professor, Dr. Akira Yamamoto, and members of my Ph.D. advisory committee: Dr. Anita Herzfeld, Dr. Mabel Rice, Dr. Joan Sereno, and Dr. Sara Thomas Rosen. Thank you to the reviewers whose suggestions improved this manuscript and to Dr. Stacy Betz for her editing input. Additionally, I thank Cherokee Nation for facilitating and supporting this research. Dr. Gloria Sly and the staff at Cherokee Cultural Resource Center helped make this study possible. Thank you also to the immersion teachers, parents and children in Tahlequah, Oklahoma for generously allowing me to conduct this research. I also acknowledge the National Institutes of Health for the Minority Predoctoral Fellowship (NIH grant No. 1 F31 HD42982–01), which provided support for preliminary research related to this project. A poster version of this article was presented at the 28th Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders (SRCLD) in Madison, Wisconsin, June 7–9, 2007.
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Influence of Second Language Cherokee Immersion on Children's Development of Past Tense in Their First Language, English
Article first published online: 16 JUN 2011
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9922.2011.00655.x
© 2011 Language Learning Research Club, University of Michigan
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How to Cite
Hirata-Edds, T. (2011), Influence of Second Language Cherokee Immersion on Children's Development of Past Tense in Their First Language, English. Language Learning, 61: 700–733. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9922.2011.00655.x
Publication History
- Issue published online: 3 AUG 2011
- Article first published online: 16 JUN 2011
- Revised version accepted 25 July 2009
- Abstract
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Keywords:
- second language;
- immersion;
- Cherokee, children;
- English past tense;
- Native language revitalization;
- crosslinguistic influences;
- bilingualism
Metalinguistic skills may develop differently in multilingual and monolingual children. This study investigated effects of immersion in Cherokee as a second language on young children's (4;5–6;1) skills of noticing morphological forms/patterns in English, their first language, by comparing English past tense skills on two nonword and two real-word tasks between a Cherokee immersion group (N= 10) and an English-medium comparison group (N= 13). Only past finiteness (irregular forms plus overregularizations) on a real-word sentence imitation task was significantly different, with the Cherokee group performing better. The children learning Cherokee as a second language were progressing as well as their monolingual peers on English past tense marking and in one area had developed increased attention to productive morphological patterns.