Simultaanse kakskeelsusega 3- ja 4-aastaste laste grammatilised oskused eesti keeles
Grammar skills of three to four-year-old simultaneously bilingual children in Estonian

Summary/Abstract: Morphosyntactic skills are a valuable marker of child language development. The acquisition of Estonian by bilingual children has been studied by few longitudinal case studies. The study reports syntax and morphology skills in three- to fouryear-old typically developing Estonian-Russian bilingual children compared to monolingual Estonian typically developing children and late talkers. Grammatical skills were measured by tasks from Speech and Language Assessment Test for three- to four-year-old Estonian children. The findings show that grammar skills of bilingual and monolingual children are different. The results of bilingual children were significantly lower than those of typically developing monolingual children, but better than those of monolingual late talkers, although non significantly. Bigger gruop differences appeared in morphology use compared to sentence production and imitation. Skills in using verbal inflection were better and more homogeneous than those of using nominal inflection. Bilingual children whose mothers provide input mainly in Estonian outperformed those whose input by mothers is mainly in Russian. In general, morphological skills of three- to four-year-old children with simultaneous bilingualism are still developing and follow similar patterns to that of typical monolingual development in grammar acquisition. Results update current knowledge about the grammar acquisition by bilingual and monolingual children in Estonian.

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