Effect of Grammatical Class in Chinese-English Bilinguals

Abstract

The present study was conducted in a Singapore, with two groups of participants: Chinese Singaporean citizens who speak proficient English but with less proficiency in Chinese, and Chinese citizens who speak proficient Chinese but with English as a foreign language. While the current research provides support for previous findings that bilinguals show less pronounced verb disadvantage, it seems that there was not a grammatical class effect in access speed and accuracy between the two groups. This shows that a Chinese background in some way does play a role in that it narrows the access difficulty between verbs and nouns.