Investigating child language acquisition from a joint perspective: A comparison of traditional and new L1 speakers of English

This chapter presents one of the first studies on the acquisition of English by young children that is informed by both corpus linguistics and World Englishes research. It compares the acquisition of past tense marking across different variety types and acquisitional settings based on data from the CHEsS corpus (Children’s English in Singapore; Buschfeld 2020) and different corpora from the CHILDES database (https://childes. talkbank. org). Specifically, we compare two-to twelve-yearold simultaneous bilingual English-Chinese children in Singapore, Hong Kong, and the US, and monolingual English children in the US. Our results suggest that important differences exist between past tense marking in the different scenarios. It is shown that, different from the monolingual US children, missing past tense inflections are characteristic of the Chinese-English bilinguals’ productions, even in later acquisitional stages. The degree to which the Chinese bilingual speakers retain them, however, depends on their acquisitional background and the linguistic input they receive.