Morphosyntactic Development in First Generation Arabic—English Children: The Effect of Cognitive, Age, and Input Factors over Time and across Languages

This longitudinal study examined morphosyntactic development in the heritage Arabic-L1 and English-L2 of first-generation Syrian refugee children (mean age = 9.5; range 6–13) within their first three years Canada. Morphosyntactic abilities were measured using sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) English Arabic that included diverse structures. Direct measures verbal non-verbal cognitive skills obtained, a parent questionnaire provided at L2 acquisition onset (AOA) input variables. We found following: Dominance L1 was evident both time periods, regardless AOA, growth bilingual over time. Cognitive accounted for substantial variance SRT scores languages times. An older AOA associated with superior Time−1 languages, but Time-2, only contributed to Arabic. Using siblings gave boost had negative effect on Time-2. conclude show strong heritage-L1 maintenance early on, individual differences have stable effects morphosyntax time, factors differential each language