Sentence repetition task for European Portuguese: results from a study with monolingual and Portuguese-German bilingual children

• Published in: Language acquisition 2024-06
• Main Authors: Correia, Liliana, Lobo, Maria, Flores, Cristina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Educação de qualidade; European Portuguese; Humanidades; Línguas e Literaturas; Sentence repetition task
• ISSN: 1532-7817
• DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2024.2346586

Published online: 03 Jun 2024 The Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) is an assessment tool for children’s language abilities, which has been used in various languages and speaker types. The present study adapted the LITMUS-SRT to European Portuguese (EP) and applied it to 43 monolingual and 25 bilingual heritage speakers of EP with German as societal language (aged 6 to 10 years), in order to evaluate their knowledge of various syntactic properties, which differ in their level of complexity. Additionally, it also assessed the effect of language experience variables—that is, richness of the heritage language (HL) input and cumulative amount of HL exposure—on the performance of the bilingual children in the task. Results demonstrate that group (monolingual vs. bilingual), the children’s age and the level of complexity (with three levels) predict children’s accuracy scores. Furthermore, it is particularly in the highest levels of complexity that the bilingual children show more variation and more protracted development, with clitics and subjunctives being the most challenging linguistic properties. As for the role of the input-related variables, richness of the HL input, but not cumulative amount of exposure, emerged as a significant predictor of the bilingual children’s accuracy. This study was partially supported by a PhD Studentship (SFRH/BD/138397/2018, for Liliana Correia) from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through national funds (Portuguese Republic|Ministry for Science, Technology and Higher Education) and the European Social Fund (Human Capital Operational Program – Portugal 2020; Regional Operational Program – Norte 2020).Another part of this research (Maria Lobo) was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P. (FCT) as part of the project UIDB/LIN/03213/2020; 10.54499/UIDB/03213/2020 and UIDP/LIN/03213/2020; 10.54499/UIDP/03213/2020 – Linguistics Research Centre of NOVA University Lisbon (CLUNL).Cristina Flores’ contribution was funded by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência Tecnologia through the project https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDB/00305/2020.