Challenges in Adjective Agreement: An Experimental Study on Bilingual Children and Adults Learning Lithuanian as a Foreign Language Cover Image

Būdvardiškųjų žodžių derinimo sunkumai: eksperimentinis dvikalbių vaikų ir svetimkalbių suaugusiųjų kalbos tyrimas
Challenges in Adjective Agreement: An Experimental Study on Bilingual Children and Adults Learning Lithuanian as a Foreign Language

Author(s): Jonas Stepšys, Laura Kamandulytė-Merfeldienė
Subject(s): Language studies, Language and Literature Studies, Foreign languages learning
Published by: Vytauto Didžiojo Universitetas
Keywords: Morphosyntax; Agreement; Adjective; Declension; Bilingualism; Lithuanian as a foreign language;

Summary/Abstract: This study aims to discuss the challenges faced by bilingual children and non-native adults in agreement of adjectival words while learning Lithuanian. The study used an experimental task based on children’s language corpus. This task was designed to reflect the diversity of adjectival and noun declension paradigms and grammatical categories. Data was collected from 35 bilingual children and 25 adults learning Lithuanian as a foreign language. The results of this study show that bilingual children primarily struggle with gender agreement in adjectival words, while non-native adults most frequently make errors in paradigm agreement. These errors are related to changing the endings of unproductive paradigms to productive ones, replication of noun inflections, and a preference for unmarked grammatical categories over marked ones.

  • Issue Year: 2024
  • Issue No: 81
  • Page Range: 117-136
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: Lithuanian
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