Exploring noun bias in pre-school children with Filipino-English bilingual and code-switched caregiver input

• Main Author: Garcia, Rochelle Irene S.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2004
• Subjects: Bilingualism in children; English language > Collective nouns; Preschool children; Code switching (Linguistics)
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/64; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etd_doctoral/article/1063/viewcontent/CDTG003830_P.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

The study examined the existence of the linguistic phenomenon the noun bias in pre-school children with Filipino- English and code-switched adult linguistic input. The respondents were (60) three-year old children and their adult caregivers (father, mother, cousins, grandmothers and yayas). All the respondents belong to middle-class families who are Filipino and English language speakers. The experiment involved a thirty-minute recording of the natural interactions of children and their adult caregivers in their respective homes. Both adults and children were recorded while doing their usual activities at home. The activities varied from book reading, eating meals, playing, etc. Respondents were strictly directed that only Filipino and English and its code-switched variety would be used during the recording sessions. The recorded data were transcribed using the transcription conventions of Cameron and Coates (1999). The transcribed data were manually counted for the total number of nouns and verbs in English and Filipino both found in the childrens and caregivers utterances. Moreover, the adult data were examined to analyze the following adult input variables: frequency of noun and verb productions and salient utterance position of nouns and verbs. The context or the pragmatic focus of the caregivers utterances was also analyzed. The data were subjected to three types of statistical analyses namely: ANOVA, Pearson Correlation and Partial Correlation. The study yielded the following results: (1) children exhibited the noun bias in the English language due to the high proportions of English nouns in their caregivers' vocabularies; (2) the English nouns found in the initial utterance-position of the caregivers' utterances is considered the salient position and children were able to produce the same lexical category in the second language; (3) the code-switched adult declarative type of interaction predominated all types of utterances as it was able to draw English noun responses from the young language learners. The study is a pioneering work in the examination of noun bias in young language learners since all existing studies on this linguistic phenomena focused on monolinguals.