Task effects on Greek-English sequential bilingual children’s morphosyntactic accuracy.

Morphosyntactic structures are often compromised in children’s production. This is often due to the difficulty of specific tasks, with language elicitation being considered more difficult than language comprehension. There is less research on whether differences exist between different elicitation tasks. The present study explored whether different elicitation tasks gave rise to comparable results in terms of bilingual children’s L2 morphosyntactic accuracy. Fifty-two Greek-English sequential bilingual children aged between 3;7-6;4, of whom 21 attended a partial immersion programme (where half the tuition is in the L2) and 31 attended a total immersion programme (where all the tuition is in the L2) completed an elicited imitation and an elicited production task that assessed their use of sentential subject pronouns and subordinate clause markers. The children’s lexical and grammatical proficiency was also measured. A binomial generalised linear mixed model (GLMM) revealed a strong interaction between task and group: children in total immersion achieved higher scores in the production task, while children in partial immersion achieved higher scores in the repetition task. These findings suggest that different elicitation tasks might give rise to different results; this highlights the importance of task choice in research studies aiming to capture bilingual children’s linguistic abilities.