Phonological and Morpho-syntactic Features of Language and Discourse of Polish Children Raised Bilingually in Migrant Communities in Great Britain

Principal investigator: dr hab. Agnieszka Otwinowska-Kasztelanic

The project stemmed from research carried out within COST Action IS0804 “Language impairment in Multilinguals Society” and the Polish project within this Action “Cognitive and language development of Polish bilingual children at the school entrance age – risks and opportunities”. They aimed at disentangling the effects of bilingualism from those of specific language impairment. The Polish team within the COST Action created and tested tools for developing norms of typical bilingual development for Polish-English children entering school education.

 

 

The study resulted in gathering vast amounts of data from Polish children living in migrant communities in the UK. The aim of the NPRH project was to describe the phonological and the morpho-syntactic systems and the discourse features of Polish-English bilingual children brought up in the migrant homes. To this end, we created a corpus of  recordings in Polish and English of bilingual children living in the UK, aged from 4;5 to 6;11. The corpus was subject to a detailed linguistic analysis and was be compared with a corpus of recordings of monolingual Polish children living in Poland, matched for age and socioeconomic status. The comparison of the language systems of bilingual and monolingual children led to examining differences between the development of their linguistic competences and discourse abilities. Additionally, we studied the directionality of cross-linguistic influences (transfer) between the two languages of  Polish-English bilingual children.

 

Duration of the project: 2014-2017

NPRH grant awarded to Agnieszka Otwinowska-Kasztelanic (Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland, 0094/NPRH3/H12/82/2014), 307 312 PLN