Download Error Patterns in the Storytelling of a Trilingual Child

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ERROR PATTERNS IN THE STORYTELLING OF A TRILINGUAL CHILD
Daniela Gatto & Lois M. Stanford
University of Alberta
Multilingual first-language children—those who are growing up learning
and using more than one language—provide an interesting picture of second language development. Studies of such children are important to linguistics because
they provide a window on questions about how to define equivalence of levels of
proficiency among the child’s languages, how to establish the presence or absence
of influences among language systems, and what effect environmental changes may
have on the status (improvement or degradation) of one or more of the languages.
In addition, these studies address with concrete data the still-frequently-expressed
fear of many parents that the development of two or more languages simultaneously will work to the detriment of a child’s eventual accomplishment in both or all
of them.
The analysis reported in this paper is part of a more extensive longitudinal study
of a single trilingual subject, SM, who is the daughter of the first author. The goals of
this larger study are the following: 1) to take a panoramic snapshot of SM’s current
proficiency in her three languages, with special interest in the relations among fluency, comprehensibility, and grammatical accuracy; in the presence or absence of
between-language influence or dominance; and in SM’s narrative organizational
skills in each language; 2) to develop an effective and efficient set of measures of these
various aspects of trilingual ability which may be used to sample SM’s language as she
grows up, and, in particular, as her language environment changes when the family
spends a year in the country where one or another of her languages is spoken.
The specific questions addressed in the part of the larger study which is discussed
in this paper are: 1) what is the relationship between the accuracy of SM’s language
production and her fluency and comprehensibility; and 2) is there significant influence, and perhaps a dominance hierarchy, among her three language systems?
1. the subject. SM has from birth been reared simultaneously in English, German,
and Italian. She was 7;10–7;11 when the data reported here were gathered.
1.1 language environment. SM and her family have lived primarily in an English
speaking area of Canada throughout her childhood, with frequent visits to relatives
in Europe and a one-year stay in Germany beginning when SM was 6;4. SM’s
mother is a native speaker of German, and she and SM always use German together.
SM’s father is a native speaker of Italian, and he and SM use Italian. SM uses English
with her peers and in the larger monolingual community, but frequently speaks in
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the appropriate language with German and Italian relatives and family friends,
either on the phone or face to face.
1.2 schooling. SM began her formal schooling with Grade 1 in Germany during
the year that the family lived there. Consequently, she learned first to read and write
in German. She was in Grade 2 in Canada in a German/English bilingual school at
the time the present study was carried out, and had switched easily to English reading and writing. Before the beginning of her formal schooling, SM had attended an
Italian Saturday kindergarten from 4;6 to 6;3, and had begun regular kindergarten
at 5;6 in a German/English bilingual school, both in Canada.
1.3 attitude. SM has a very positive attitude toward her unusual language milieu.
She enjoys using all three of her languages, and takes pride in being trilingual. She
always responds in the language in which she is addressed, and has never exhibited
the more usual pattern of the multilingual child of selecting one language for production (English would be predicted in her circumstances) and maintaining only a
receptive ability in the others.
SM particularly enjoyed the task that was given her in this study, that of narrating stories in her three languages. She is an interesting and dramatic storyteller, and
she seemed to view all three languages as equally good tools for this pursuit. Several
different measures which are not reported in detail in this paper (e.g., length of stories, narrative cohesion, content richness) indicated that her stories in one language
were not just derivative or reduced versions of those in another language, but that
she approached each narration as a task to be done in the language requested and
not as a task of translation.
2. telling the stories
2.1 stimulus materials. The wordless picture storybooks known collectively to
linguistic researchers as ‘the frog stories’ were used as stimuli to elicit SM’s narratives. Six stories were required for the experimental design, so the five stories which
are actually about the adventures of a frog (Mayer 1977, 1980a, 1980b; Mayer &
Mayer 1977, 1978) were supplemented by a similar Mayer story about the trials of a
hippopotamus with hiccups (Mayer 1978). The Mayer books are excellent stimuli
for eliciting narration: the characters, animal and human, are engaging; the tales are
substantial and concern real emotions and lively adventures; the pictures are full of
rich detail.
2.2 elicitation. SM was asked to tell each of the six stories in each of her three languages. Before she actually told the stories, she had discussed all of the picture
books with a native speaker of each language. These discussions, which were
intended to familiarise SM with the story content, never involved actually telling
the story by either SM or the adult discussant. Thus SM came to the task with
knowledge of the content of the tales, but no actual verbal rehearsal of them.
error patterns in the storytelling of a trilingual child
133
The question of an audience for the story tellings who might be expected to
understand the language SM was using was approached by nominating three of her
teddybears to be, respectively, English, German, and Italian ‘speakers’. SM was initially enthusiastic about this idea, and the bears were provided with appropriate
ethnic names, but at the time of the tellings SM actually told the stories for her
mother, whom she knew to understand all three languages.
2.3 the data. SM told the stories on six days over the span of a week and a half, and
the tellings were audiotape-recorded. On each recording day SM told three different stories, one in each language. The order of use of the three languages on the
recording days was counterbalanced, so that in the resulting 18 stories, each language was used twice as the first language of a session, twice as the second, and
twice as the last. However, upon analysis, no significant order effect appeared.
Although SM claimed to like some of the stories much better than others, this also
is not evident in the narrations, which showed no significant story effect. All of her
stories are lively, with sound effects and dramatic voice changes to reflect the action.
The actions are never just described as observed; the participants in the stories talk
in individual character voices, and even the animals think aloud at times.
The tapes were transcribed, and SM’s productions were evaluated by two native
speakers for each language. The evaluators, a male and a female for each language,
were not otherwise involved in the study. All hold advanced degrees, and are professionally involved in language studies (primarily in literature and translation);
none has worked with language acquisition or bilingualism in children. They heard
the tapes and read the transcriptions, and were asked to provide an impressionistic
evaluation of SM’s fluency, accuracy, comprehensibility, and overall proficiency in
their language, and a detailed indication of non-accurate or non-standard forms
in the scripts.
3. analyses. As part of the larger study mentioned above, a number of analyses
were made of the narrative data. In addition to the qualitative analyses and the
lexical and morphosyntactic error identification provided by the native speaking
evaluators, SM’s narratives were analysed quantitatively for lexical richness and
diversity (vocabulary size and type/token ratios), amount of between-language
lexical borrowing, narrative length and content, control of narrative discourse
structure, and frequency of various hesitation phenomena (filled and unfilled
pauses, false starts, redirections).
In the study reported in this paper, a subset of these analyses was used to determine SM’s accuracy in each of her languages. Frequency and direction of lexical
borrowings and frequency, nature, and probable source of lexical and morphosyntactic errors (which will hereafter be discussed together as ‘errors’) were
analysed in some detail. Other indicators in the data, both quantitative and qualitative, had shown that SM ranked high in fluency and comprehensibility in all
three languages (see Gatto 1998 and Gatto & Stanford 1998). The picture presented
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by the error analysis shows far less consistency across the languages, and consequently provides a richer insight into the workings of SM’s multilingual language
systems. We will argue below that it also shows, in addition to developmental
errors that are similar to (if more extensive and longer lasting than) those of
monolingual children, negative transfers from her stronger languages (usually
English, but sometimes German); at least some indications of interconnectedness
between the Italian and German grammatical systems; and dominance (Romaine
1995) of the weakest language system (Italian) by the others.
4. results.
4.1 sources of error. While error analysis is chiefly used in connection with second
language acquisition, in SM’s case it provided considerable insight into her relative
abilities in her three native languages. While error analysis is not an exact science, and
not all of SM’s errors could be tidily accounted for, the analysis showed a great deal
about the maturity and independence or interdependence of her languages.
As will be shown below, SM makes a number errors which we categorise as
developmental, which might be expected in a child receiving on-going extensive
input in all three languages. Review of monolingual developmental errors in
English, German, and Italian (deVilliers & deVilliers 1985, Mills 1985, Clark 1985)
suggests that SM’s errors in this category differ chiefly in quantity from those made
by monolingual children, persist to a later age, and are perhaps in some cases
fossilized. They are particularly interesting in the present study because their frequency differs markedly among SM’s three languages. An example of such a sort of
error, discussed more fully below, is SM’s consistent omission of auxiliary verbs in
the Italian passato prossimo compound verb form.
However, throughout the 18 narratives we also find considerable evidence of
errors resulting from negative transfer from one language to another, either as nonsystematic mistakes or as broader systemic influences on a grammatical system.
This category of error also differs in frequency by language. It is instantiated by the
word order errors in German and the pronoun errors in Italian, both discussed further below.
In addition to these two primary sources of error, SM exhibits a few errors
stemming from incorrect input; her father is a speaker of a regional Italian dialect,
and the evaluators judged several of his forms ‘non-standard’ or just incorrect.
There are, in the narratives, also a very few random mistakes, the source of which
is not evident. Neither of these two categories is extensive enough to warrant further discussion.
4.2 quantity of error. For the remainder of the discussion of errors in this paper,
we will report data from only one of the six stories, Frog Goes to Dinner (Mayer
1977). Thus the figures presented below are based on the English, German, and
Italian narrations of just this story. These narrations, however, are typical of both
quantitative and qualitative observations made on the whole corpus of SM’s stories.
error patterns in the storytelling of a trilingual child
Errors
Clauses
English
15*
112
135
German Italian
59
205**
132
107
* count includes two idiom errors not discussed further
** count includes one idiom error not discussed further
Table 1. Number of error tokens and clauses of the Frog Goes to Dinner narratives.
Error tokens
Error types
English
15
15
German
59
25
Italian
205
28
Table 2. Error tokens and error types in Frog Goes to Dinner.
Table 1 shows the number of errors occurring in the English, German, and
Italian versions of Frog Goes to Dinner, compared to the length of each story measured by the number of clauses that were elicited by the 22 pictures in this book.
Note that the three stories are not too different in number of clauses, but they are
quite different in number of errors.
However, the actual number of errors (the error tokens) is only one measure of
error rate. Many of SM’s errors in German and Italian were repetitive, and another
useful measure of grammatical proficiency emerges if we compare actual error
tokens to error types. This type/token ratio is produced by grouping each set of repetitions (tokens) of the same error as a single type error. Table 2 shows the
type/token ratio, indicating the error-repetition rate in each language, and providing another picture of SM’s accuracy.
While there is a dramatic reduction in the German and Italian errors when they
are analysed as types, a word of warning is perhaps in order about the sorts of decisions necessary to group a collection of error tokens into a smaller set of error
types. While it is quite easy to justify counting SM’s frequent confusion of definite
determiners dem and den in the German case system as a single error type, how
should the variety of her other German determiner case errors be counted? Do all
case errors count as a single type, or should different case errors be counted separately? We took the view in this analysis that morphosyntactic error categories
should count as a single error type; thus all of SM’s German case errors are reduced
to one single type error, and in her Italian story the 49 (in one story!) omissions of
an auxiliary verb in the compound passato prossimo tense are also one single type
error. However, individual lexical errors were each counted as one error type, as
were each of SM’s few syntactic error patterns. While we have been consistent in
this analysis in our reduction of tokens to types, more thought in the future should
be given to a principled algorithm for reducing error tokens to error types.
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Borrowed words
Semantic errors
English
2 (<G)
2
German Italian
4 (<E) 8 (<E), 1 (<G)
2
6
Table 3. Error tokens and error types in Frog Goes to Dinner.
4.3 categories of error. SM’s errors fell into three general categories: lexical
(including borrowings), syntactic (word order), and the largest group, errors in
inflectional morphology and function words.
4.3.1 lexical errors were relatively infrequent in all three languages. Those that
did occur were of two types. There were uncomplicated borrowings from one language into another. For example, in the German story SM used the English conductor instead of Dirigent; in the English story German der Mann rather than husband;
in the Italian story the English verb laughed for riso. In all of the cases of borrowing
into English and German, SM knew the correct word, as evidenced by her use of it
elsewhere in the narratives or in her everyday conversation; however, in most of the
cases of borrowing into Italian, she did not know (when asked directly after the storytelling) the needed Italian word.
In the second type of lexical error, which we have called semantic, SM used a
word from the correct language with the wrong meaning or form (often a constructed form). For example, in the English story she called ‘a menu mounted on
the wall’ a chart; in the German she used the adjective gemein ‘mean’ for böse ‘upset’;
and in the Italian story she said ancora when she meant più (both mean ‘again’ but
are appropriate in different contexts). She also constructed unique forms, e.g.,
*armsleeve for ‘sleeve’ in the English story. Some of these words she certainly knew
(sleeve, böse), and others she didn’t (più). However, these sorts of borrowing or substitution allowed her to not interrupt the flow of her story.
Table 3 shows the lexical error frequencies for the three languages for Frog Goes
to Dinner, with the source of borrowed words indicated by the initial letter of the
lending language. The pattern suggests better knowledge of English and German
lexicon than of Italian. The fact that most of the borrowings are from English suggests that lexical access for English may be faster than for the other two languages;
this may be because SM is currently living in an English environment.
4.3.2 word order errors were also infrequent, but those that occurred were interesting. The English version of Frog Goes to Dinner has no word order errors, the
German version has eight, and the Italian has two. In many cases, the errors clearly
result from transfer from English syntax. In both languages, for example, SM constructs an incorrect short genitive. In the German story she produces *der Junges
Geburtstag ‘the boy’s birthday’ rather than the correct long form der Geburtstag von
dem Jungen and *den Jungen’s Tasche ‘the boy’s pocket’ instead of der Tasche von dem
Jungen. This is analogous to the English pattern, but it should also be noted that this
error patterns in the storytelling of a trilingual child
137
is a developmental error seen in quite young German monolingual children (Mills
1985), so its source in SM’s narratives is unclear. In Italian, she produces *il persone’s
testa ‘the person’s head’ instead of la testa delle persone. In both German and Italian,
she resorts to English-like adverb placement: *was ist denn los jetzt (should be was ist
denn jetzt los) ‘what’s wrong now!’ and *non viene a tuo ristorante ancora ‘I won’t
come to your restaurant again!’ (In this last example, there are other problems: viene
is the wrong verb form, and the adverb ancora should be più, but in any case in
Italian the adverb should follow the verb.) In two German sentences SM treats the
particle of the separable verb as if it were an English preposition: for example, she
says *da fiel der Frosch raus aus den Saxofon (den is also incorrect) ‘then the frog fell
out of the saxophone’ rather than the correct da fiel der Frosch aus dem Saxofon
(raus). (The other separable particle example involves the verb reinspringen ‘leap
into’ in a complicated sentence and was judged dialectally acceptable by one of the
evaluators.) Verbs are placed before their complements in the English pattern in two
German sentences: *wenn die war’n zu Hause ‘when they got home’ (should be wenn
die zu Hause war’n, and, of course, *wenn should be als) and *der hat ganz vergessen
über den Frosch ‘he had completely forgotten about the frog’, (correctly der hat den
Frosch ganz vergessen), and, in addition, in this last sentence *vergessen über is modeled on the English two-part verb forgotten about. In fact, the only word order error
in the Frog Goes to Dinner stories that does not have an evident English model is the
German *so schon früh hier? ‘back already?’ in which the placement of schon is incorrect. (Either schon so früh hier or so früh schon hier would be acceptable.)
Several points are of interest in these word-order error data. The first is that SM
knew the German and Italian syntactic structures on which she made the above
errors, and produced them correctly elsewhere in the data. These are performance
mistakes, and not errors in grammatical knowledge. The second is that it is always
English which provides the syntactic structure adverted to when the target form is
missed; of the three languages, English seem to be the most easily activated. The
third is simply to note in passing in how many cases a word which has a clear
English cognate is involved in the English-like structure: Italian ristorante, persone;
German Geburtstag, Jungen, Frosch, vergessen, Saxofon, Haus, Glas, Wein (the latter
two from the reinspringen sentence), and to speculate about the possible role of
semantic activation in sentence production.
4.3.3 inflectional and function word errors comprised the largest and most
interesting category. We classed these errors into four groups: preposition, pronoun, NP inflection (gender, number, case), and verb (stem, inflection) errors.
Table 4 (overleaf) shows the number of tokens in each error group for the three versions of Frog Goes to Dinner.
In the preposition group, the English and German errors are chiefly caused by
the incorrect transfer of prepositions, each from the other language. Two factors
probably lead SM to this error. The first is that prepositions have generally rather
low semantic weight, and errors in them often have little consequence in compre-
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Preposition errors
Pronoun errors
NP inflection errors
Verb errors
Stems
Inflection
English
8
1
0
German
6
2
34
Italian
20
32
29
0
0
2
1
26
80
Table 4. Inflectional and function word error tokens by category in Frog Goes to
Dinner.
hension. The second is that in English and German many of the preposition forms
are cognates or even identical but have slightly different uses in the two languages.
SM’s English and German are both very strong, which probably accounts for the
transfer occurring in both directions. These facts offer an account for the patterns
that SM produces. For example, in the English story she says *the mom from the boy,
translating directly the German von; and *the turtle looked to him (meaning ‘at
him’), translating German zu; transferring in the other direction, in the German
story she says *kriegt er ihn bei den Füßen to mean ‘he gets him by the feet’ rather
than the correct an den Füßen.
The Italian errors in the preposition category are quite different. They involve
SM’s failure to control the very irregular Italian portmanteau forms of the preposizioni articolate (prepositions + articles, e.g. in + la = nella, see Lazzarino & Moneti
1992). It should be noted that German also has such portmanteau forms, for example ins Kino (in das Kino) ‘to the movies’, and SM produced these almost without
error. We have interpreted the Italian preposition errors to be developmental.
Although it was not possible to match SM strictly with an Italian monolingual ageequivalent group, observation of younger Italian children shows them making
some of the same sorts of errors. More importantly, neither English nor German
seems to have any obvious influence on the sorts of Italian errors she makes, and
her error patterns show the following characteristics. She occasionally constructs a
portmanteau form correctly (alla musica, nella macchina), but most are still incorrect. Her mistakes are not always the same (not fossilized), and many of them
appear to result from regularization of gender and number marking (*di for both
della and dalla, *a for ai, al, and alla), suggesting that she is aware of a system but
does not yet well control its forms.
Neither English nor German has significant pronoun errors. However, in Italian
SM shows both confusion of forms and at least one wrong assumption about the
pronoun system. In Frog Goes to Dinner the form errors include, among others, four
cases of the use of *lua/luo as the possessive pronoun rather than the correct
sua/suo, and seven cases of a pronoun with incorrect gender. Her incorrect assumption about the personal pronoun system appears to be based on reference to the
German system, since in 17 cases she uses Italian lei ‘she’ when she means ‘they’ (loro
error patterns in the storytelling of a trilingual child
139
would be the correct form) in a manner analogous to German Sie ‘she, they’. This
last example is perhaps one of the clearest cases of interconnectedness between two
of SM’s language systems.
The NP inflectional errors are represented by a large number of tokens in both
German and Italian. SM does not make any inflectional errors in English, but the
English NP inflectional system is so reduced that there is little room for error, in any
case. In German and Italian, the NP inflection errors are quite different in nature.
While there are a few random errors such as *das Salat ‘the salad’ for der Salat (gender) and *ein Tag directly from English ‘one day…’ to start the story (should be
genitive eines Tages), the majority of SM’s German errors are simply the confusion
of dem and den, the dative and accusative case forms of the definite article. This
confusion is a developmental pattern seen pervasively in German monolingual
children, probably exacerbated by the acoustic similarity of the final nasals in these
unstressed syllables (Mills 1985).
The Italian NP inflection errors are far more diverse, and result from gender and
number confusions. While the majority of SM’s NPs are correctly inflected, she
makes 29 inflection errors in Frog Goes to Dinner and they show no consistent pattern. While she sometimes correctly says una persona ‘a person’ with both article
and noun feminine, she also produces *un persone with an incorrect masculine singular article and a correct feminine plural noun, *un persona (masculine article and
feminine noun), and *due personi ‘two people’ with a masculine plural noun. She
produces rana ‘frog’ correctly as a feminine noun, sometimes correctly collocated
with feminine determiners la ‘the’ and una ‘a’, but also incorrectly with masculine
forms like mio ‘my’ and il ‘the’. The phrase tutta la gente ‘all the people’ (feminine
singular) is produced as *tutti (plural) la genti (masculine plural). Such errors are
certainly intralanguage in origin, although Clark (1985) does not specifically discuss
them as developmental. Perhaps the most general statement that can be made is
that it appears that SM’s control of Italian NP inflection is automated to the extent
of producing inflectional markings, but not to the extent of consistently producing
the correct ones.
In the verb error group, SM makes no errors in English, and only a few in German
in Frog Goes to Dinner. The German errors are regularization of irregular stems,
which Mills (1985) identifies as a developmental error of German monolingual children, and one case of an incorrect auxiliary in a compound tense—an interesting
error since the auxiliary selected would have been the correct one in English. SM’s
Italian verb errors, however, are again very interesting, as well as very numerous. (SM
got only 12 verb forms correct in this story.) The verb errors fall into two categories:
verb stem errors and verb inflection errors. The verb stem errors most frequently
concern the regularization of irregular past participles, since they occur commonly
in past-time narration in Italian. (Clark 1985 comments on this as a common developmental error in Italian monolingual children.) For example, in place of preso, the
irregular past participle of the verb prendere ‘to take’ SM constructs a more regular
*prenduto. And for one high-frequency irregular verb (andare, ‘to go’) she constructs
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daniela gatto & lois m. stanford
a regular past participle on the wrong stem form: she consistently produces *vato
from the 3rd singular present form va ‘he/she goes’ to which she adds the regular past
participle marker -to. (The correct past participle of andare is andato.) The *vato
error alone occurs ten times in Frog Goes to Dinner.
As for SM’s Italian verb inflection errors, the majority are errors or, more commonly, omissions of the auxiliary verb in compound tenses, particularly the passato
prossimo which she correctly attempts to use for a past-time narration. Forty-nine
such errors occur in the story, with frequent repetitions of *detto for ha detto ‘said’
and *saltata for è saltata ‘jumped’. In spite of the fact that both English and German
provide her with models of compound tenses very similar to those in Italian (and
she produces such forms correctly in those languages), SM has apparently established a rule in Italian that the passato prossimo consists of a bare past participle
with no auxiliary. While this may be a developmental stage for very young Italian
monolinguals (as it is in very young English monolinguals) it is not a form which
would persist to SM’s age. The forms appear to have fossilized, and it is worth noting that they do not show the sometimes correct / sometimes incorrect variability
that SM’s Italian preposition and NP inflection errors do. It will be of special interest to see whether time in an Italian environment causes equivalent improvement
in all three of these error types.
To summarise briefly the preceding catalogue, what we see in SM’s error patterns
in Frog Goes to Dinner (as in the whole corpus) is a combination of developmental
errors, some of which may be fossilized; simple (and often ad hoc) negative transfers from one of her other languages—most often from English, although sometimes from German; and, at least in the matter of Italian pronouns, a confusion of
part of the system with the German pronominal system.
5. conclusions. What should we conclude from these data about SM’s proficiency
in her three languages, and perhaps more generally, about childhood multilingualism of her sort? The most obvious conclusion about SM’s languages is that she is
far less grammatically proficient in Italian than she is in English or German, in
which her skills seem relatively comparable. This is clear when we look at the quantity of errors in the three languages. It is even more evident when we look at the
nature of the errors in each language. In the category of lexical borrowing, English
and German borrow lightly from each other, but Italian borrows quite freely from
English. All three languages exhibit a few intralanguage semantic errors. SM’s
English narration contains few significant errors; the only ones of real interest are
the small set of bi-directional transfer errors with German prepositions (see discussion above). SM’s German, aside from the just-mentioned prepositions, has primarily developmental errors in NP inflections, analogous in type if not in number
to those of a monolingual German child although one of a slightly younger age;
some verb stem regularization; and a few interesting syntactic word order errors
perhaps transferred from English. SM’s Italian, however, is characterised by the
combination of a number of transfer effects and quite extensive and persistent
error patterns in the storytelling of a trilingual child
141
developmental errors, at least one class of which may have fossilized (see passato
prossimo discussion). The error analysis thus appears to show the picture of three
languages developing in parallel, with one, Italian, weaker than the others, and
dominated in some aspects by them.
We may conclude further that, however revealing SM’s error patterns have been
about her relative grammatical accuracy in her three languages, the complete picture
of her proficiency must be based on more than an error analysis. In SM’s language
we do not find a trade-off between accuracy and fluency nor between accuracy and
comprehensibility. Despite SM’s differing levels of accuracy in English, German,
and Italian, her evaluators judged her to be communicative and fluent in all three
languages. While the evaluators’ view of her fluency may be somewhat coloured by
SM’s dramatic gifts as a storyteller and her paralinguistic techniques for enriching
her narration, the quantitative measures of vocabulary, story length, paucity of hesitation and redirection, and narrative cohesion substantiate their views (see Gatto
1998 and Gatto & Stanford 1998). The question of comprehensibility, moreover,
raises an interesting observation. It is that SM’s errors, and in particular the numerous Italian errors, occur primarily in inflections and function words. Such elements
tend to be redundant and hence low in information weight; they often have more of
an error-correcting function in language than a significant semantic value (a characteristic which may make them difficult to eradicate). This means that, given a fluent narration, comprehensibility may be little interfered with by even the fairly high
level of grammatical inaccuracy that SM’s Italian stories exhibit.
The final conclusion is that this detailed error analysis,taken in conjunction with
the additional measures of fluency and accuracy, has provided useful baseline data
for further study of SM’s trilingual development. In general, it provides a tool for
measuring the relative strength of aspects of the languages of a multilingual child,
and also possible changes in those strengths with a change in language environment. In SM’s case, these measures, to be taken again in 2002 when she has spent a
year in Italy and completed Grade 6 in an Italian school, will yield interesting quantitative data on the changes brought about in this multilingual child by alteration
in the linguistic environment in late childhood.
PRIMARY TEXTS
Mayer, Mercer. 1977. Frog goes to dinner. Hong Kong: Puffin Pied Piper.
———. 1978. Hiccup. Hong Kong: Puffin Pied Piper.
———. 1980. Frog on his own. Hong Kong: Puffin Pied Piper.
———. 1980. Frog, where are you? Hong Kong: Puffin Pied Piper.
——— & Marianna Mayer. 1977. One frog too many. Hong Kong: Puffin
Pied Piper.
——— & ———. 1978. A boy, a dog, a frog and a friend. Hong Kong: Puffin Pied
Piper.
142
daniela gatto & lois m. stanford
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