The Acquisition of Copula Verbs in English/Spanish and Bulgarian/Spanish Bilingual Children: Language Contact in Early Bilingualism

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the 2L1 English/Spanish and 2L1 Bulgarian/Spanish acquisition of the English, Spanish, and Bulgarian copula verbs, i.e. to be, ser and estar, and съм (sam) respectively. Previous studies on monolingual language acquisition dealing with this topic have argued that English children’s production is characterized by high omission rates in stage-level (SL) predicates as opposed to individual-level (IL) predicates; while that of Spanish children’s show virtually no omission. In the case of bilingual language acquisition, children acquiring English and Spanish simultaneously have been said to acquire the English copula verb earlier than L1 English speakers and to present much lower omission rates. Spontaneous data from five children have been analyzed for this study in order to determine whether these children produce higher rates of null copulas with IL or SL predicates. Moreover, it aims at establishing whether bilingual children acquire this grammatical item sooner (i.e. there is acceleration), later (i.e. there is delay), or at the same pace (i.e. no bilingual effect) as their monolingual counterparts (i.e. L1 English and L1 Spanish). Finally, this study addresses the issue of dominance in order to determine whether the bilingual children are Spanish dominant or English dominant, in the case of the two 2L1 English/Spanish children, or Bulgarian dominant, in the case of the 2L1 Bulgarian/Spanish child. Results show that in the one-copula languages, i.e. English and Bulgarian, the omission of the copula verb is linked to the predicate type since higher rates of omission have been found with SL predicates in all the children’s output. However, this is not the case for Spanish, the two-copula language. From a developmental point of view, no bilingual effect has been detected in the Spanish data from the three bilingual children. However, the acquisition of the English copula verb in the case of the 2L1 English/Spanish children is delayed with respect to their L1 counterpart. This suggests that the bilingual children under analysis are Spanish dominant in terms of the copula verb.