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Language Attrition and Pragmatic Competence Transfer in Immigrant Children: A Case Study of Chinese Americans in the U.S.

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Abstract
Previous research has made significant strides in understanding children's language acquisition. However, the phenomenon of language attrition in children, particularly among bilingual children who are native Chinese speakers, remains largely unexplored. With increasing global migration and population mobility, many children who migrate during childhood lose the ability to communicate in their mother tongue within a few years. This underscores the importance of studying language attrition and the impact of newly acquired languages on the fading native language. Such research offers valuable insights into human cognition, language acquisition, and language theory. This study presents a case study of language attrition and transfer in two Chinese-English bilingual children after their move from China to the United States. The father of the subjects is a native Chinese speaker, and their mother is a native English speaker fluent in Chinese. The children spent their early childhood in China, where the dominant language at home and in society was Chinese. When the children were six (Jenny) and three and a half years old (Lisa), the family moved to the United States, making Chinese their minority language, limited to family communication. Using regularly updated internet videos, the researcher observes family conversations from six months before the move to the year following the move. Through discourse analysis and longitudinal comparisons, this study examines the language attrition and pragmatic transfer characteristics of the two children after their relocation. The analysis focuses on discourse proportion, fluency, lexical richness, syntactic accuracy, pragmatic competence, and communicative strategies in different languages. The findings are discussed in terms of the age of onset of input deficit, family and social factors, and affective factors such as language attitudes. Unlike prior studies that regularly test children's language after immigration, this research is grounded in observations of daily family interactions, allowing for a nuanced exploration of the language attrition process. Ultimately, the findings underscore the significance of the age at which language input is diminished and the crucial role of continued, intentional reinforcement of the native language in supporting bilingual development in immigrant children.
Type
Thesis (1 Year Campus Access Only)
Date
2024-09
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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