Interference of English L2 in the acquisition of Tagalog L1 word order

This paper discusses how the second language (L2) of a child could interfere with the first language (L1) acquisition of word order and case, particularly when the two languages are typologically distinct. This research is based on data from a task-oriented experiment with a Tagalog-English bilingual child, and to my knowledge, is the only recent study to investigate the effects of bilingualism on the acquisition of syntactic word order in Tagalog. Tagalog has a relatively free word order complemented by a comparatively rich case marking system on determiners (Rackowski 2002). When a child learns L2 like English, however, interference could delay or prevent the complete acquisition of L1 grammar due to an uneven amount of input between the two languages (Polinsky 1995). In this study, a bilingual child (Tagalog L1; English L2) is asked to describe the action in an image using Tagalog sentences, and then match another set of images with a stimulus Tagalog sentence. The results show that the bilingual child’s elicited sentences have a fixed word order and limited case marking, more similar to English than to Tagalog. This could explain his low performance in the picture-matching task. These results suggest that there is a possible interference in the bilingual child’s complete acquisition of Tagalog syntactic word order because of the input he receives from English. The paper concludes with recommendations on how to further explore the findings presented. (University of California, Los Angeles)