1. Selected research
     The use of gestures in language to compensate or replace parts of the intended language    Syntactic awareness and judgment of monolingual-bilingual speakers    Cross-linguistic transfer in adjective-noun strings by preschool bilingual children    Differences among bilingual and monolingual children  

2. References

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Elena Nicoladis is a professor in science and psychology for the University of Alberta in Canada. She is interested in how children acquire language as either monolinguals or bilinguals. She continues to do her research on the acquisition of the language and the morphology. Bilinguals hear less of each language than monolinguals so her interest is more focused on them because of their disadvantage in acquiring language.

Selected research

The use of gestures in language to compensate or replace parts of the intended language

Elena Nicoladis is responsible for researching the use of gestures in language for those who seem to struggle with language. This includes: the elderly, a child learning their first language or someone learning their second language to become bilingual. Nicoladis and her colleagues were able to develop hypotheses around this subject and came up with some questions and answers that pertain. Their findings were that the use of gestures is found in the various groups to replace or aid in the absence and weak portions of an individual's language. Individuals use gestures called iconic or symbolic gestures which are gestures to depict the subject at hand without having to say a word. In other words they use this as their reference to what they are trying to convey to the audience. An example of an iconic gesture is when a child is flapping their hand to indicate a butterfly or when someone is moving their index finger and middle finger back and forth to represent someone walking (Nicoladis 2002). Ironically, the findings were that the people with more speaking experience, including: elders, deaf people, and bilinguals, used more iconic gestures in their speaking. Bilinguals use more iconic gestures in their native or stronger language and tend to use more conventional gestures. This was demonstrated using five second language with French as their first language and five with Swedish as their first language. (Nicoladis 2002).^[1] The main point out of this study is that gestures do help with the message that language tries to convey but the types of gestures and use is different for everyone. This does not necessarily mean that it is for assisting the absence or weakness of speech, rather that gestures are based on the higher proficiency of the language.

Syntactic awareness and judgment of monolingual-bilingual speakers

Nicoladis examines the syntactic awareness (children’s ability arrange words and phrases) of monolingual and bilingual children. She assesses their syntax through the grammatical accuracy of their sentences and by administering a vocabulary test. The study of syntactic awareness and judgment consisted of 39 French-English bilingual children and 51 English monolingual children all from Alberta, Canada. This study was intended to test two different predictions (Foursha-Stevenson, and Nicoladis).^[2] The first was that bilinguals were better aware of syntactic awareness compared to monolinguals. Nicoladis made this prediction because children have been shown to have experience assessing words and sentence arrangements from the age of two. This experience helps their language development because they have more practice with the language compared to monolinguals. Her second prediction was whether bilingual children’s judgment of what is grammatically correct could be influenced by their other language. In the article Early emergence of syntactic awareness and cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children’s judgments, Nicoladis concludes that bilinguals produced higher accuracy scores compared to monolinguals (Foursha-Stevenson, and Nicoladis).^[2] However, on the grammatical accuracy, monolinguals scored higher on vocabulary tests (Foursha-Stevenson, and Nicoladis).^[2] Bilinguals must be able to differentiate between two different languages which enhances their attention for language choice. The results also indicated that language variability leads to greater susceptibility for cross-linguistic influence. Meaning that children’s judgment of what is acceptable syntactic structure can be influenced by the other language they speak. Children tend to link the two together when trying to determine acceptable syntactic structure.

Cross-linguistic transfer in adjective-noun strings by preschool bilingual children

In her study of bilingualism, Nicoladis investigated the effects of whether children who speak more than one language experience what is called “cross-linguistic influence”, which is when one language spoken by a bi/multi-lingual individual affects the way they use grammar in other languages. Examples of this behavior would be different placements of object clitics in French-English bilinguals (Hulk, 1997),^[3] object dropping in Dutch-French and German-Italian bilinguals (Hulk and Muller, 2000),^[4] and verb-object compounds in French-English bilinguals (Nicoladis, 2003).^[5] The study was performed with 89 children of preschool age (3;3-5;7), consisting of French-English bilinguals, English monolinguals, and French monolinguals. It found that its original hypothesis, that cross-linguistic transfer would occur in children due to structural overlap or ambiguity, was correct by showing that French-English bilingual children will reverse post-nominal adjectives more often than monolingual children. This objective of this study was not only to demonstrate that bilingual children engage in this behavior, but to close a gap of knowledge within bilingual research. Prior to this, studies had only been performed on experimental speech of children rather than the spontaneous. This study was performed with its focus primarily on the spontaneous speech of bilingual children.

Differences among bilingual and monolingual children

Nicoladis makes the claim that bilingual children are not disadvantaged but delayed in their language development since they are learning two languages simultaneously (Paradis & Genesee, 1996).^[6] Therefore, their vocabulary is much richer in one language over the other, an issue mono-linguistic speakers don't have. However, a longitudinal study of both monolingual and bilingual children would test if that assumption is warranted. Because of the diversity of child bilinguals, there are few studies that can address the possibility that young bilinguals might be delayed in language acquisition. Nicoladis also found that bilingualism doesn’t necessarily lead to delays in morphosyntactic acquisition. The main goal of this study was to test contrastively predictions of both the single‐ and dual‐route model for French‐English bilingual children's past tense production. As opposed to monolinguals, bilinguals are more likely to use perfect forms like “have seen” when they actually mean “saw” because of the influence of the periphrastic past tense in French; similarly, bilinguals are more likely to use single‐word imperfect forms in French rather than the compound past. Nicoladis et al. (2007) found no evidence of these forms of crosslinguistic transfer in their study on narrative. As a result, she infers that crosslinguistic transfer is not likely to affect the results of the study; that is, the bilingual children can be expected to be acquiring the past tense like monolinguals in their two languages.

References

• English Graffiti
• English grain aphid
• English grammar disputes
• English Grammar School
• English Green Party
• English Greens
• English Grove Lake
• English Harbour (disambiguation)
• English Harbour West, Newfoundland and Labrador
• English Head Formation
• English Heritage Archive
• English Heritage Trust
• English highest football division
• English High School (Lynn, Massachusetts)
• English High School of Boston
• English History, 1914–1945
• English History 1914–1945
• English History: 1914–1945
• English Hockey League
• English Home Rule
• English home rule
• English honourific
• English honourifics
• English idiom
• English Immigration in Nicaragua