Use of nonword and sentence repetition tasks with Mandarin-English bilingual children in Malaysia

• Main Author: Woon, Chai Ping
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: Bilingualism in children - Malaysia
• Online Access: http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/71055/1/FBMK%202015%20108%20IR.pdf; http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/71055/

Nonword repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been used in measuring children’s expressive language skills in normal and abnormal language development and language learning, as well for surveying the proficiency of bilingual language development. Researchers often use NWR to study the mechanisms of phonological short-term memory underlying children’s language learning, whereas SR might assess not only short-term memory but also long-term memory. Recently, NWR and SR tasks have been recognized as a potential psycholinguistic tool to identify bilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI). NWR and SR tasks are easy and quick to conduct, and useful tools for obtaining quantitative and qualitative information about children’s lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge, as well as language development in a complex linguistic background. This study reports the results of the performance of NWR and SR tasks among bilingual Mandarin-English preschoolers, between the age four to six. The tasks were conducted in two languages: Mandarin and English, to investigate how bilingual children would perform in NWR and SR tasks in different age groups, and also to examine the type of frequent error patterns found among different age groups in the repetition tasks. Overall task accuracy in each language was compared; phoneme and grammatical errors in NWR and SR tasks were described qualitatively. The overall results showed that the older children performed better than the younger children; and children performed better in the Mandarin tasks, compared to the English task. There was an indication that language knowledge and language experience influenced the performance on the tasks. The study also showed that the grammatical errors found in the SR tasks may have potential of being used to distinguish children with typical and atypical language development.