2025/26 Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture: Puzzling patterns in bilingual children’s Cantonese (Research Seminar)

What, if anything, is special about bilingual children’s Cantonese? When we observe the Cantonese of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English, we find that they produce some ‘non-target’ forms. For example, children produce dative sentences with the order “give-recipient-object”, as in (1), which differs from the distinctive order (“give-object-recipient”) of adult Cantonese:

(1) 耶穌俾我錢呀

Je4sou1 bei2 ngo5 cin2 aa3 (“Jesus gives me money”)

Children also ‘misplace’ prepositional phrases (PPs) by putting them after the verb, as in (2) where hai2li1dou6 “here”) is misplaced:

(2) 又食喺呢度呀，你

Jau6 sik6 hai2 li1dou6 aa4, lei5? (“eating here again, are you?”)

In answering questions, bilingual children often use 係 hai6 (to be) inappropriately to mean “yes”, as in (3), where adult Cantonese requires the adjective 好食 hou2sik6 ‘tasty’ of the ‘A-not-A’ question to be repeated in the response:

(3)       好唔好食㗎
Adult: hou2 m4 hou2 sik6 gaa3? (“Is it tasty?”)

            係呀
Child: hai6 aa3 (“yes”)

We may suspect that the children who produce these non-target forms are influenced by their English, which would be an instance of cross-linguistic influence or language transfer. But there are other plausible explanations to consider, such as over-generalization of patterns already present in Cantonese. Indeed, all three patterns — the “give-recipient-object” order in dative sentences, prepositional phrases after the verb, and answers using 係 hai6 to mean “yes” — exist in Cantonese.

In this seminar we will tackle the question of why bilingual children produce such patterns in their speech, and attempt to tease apart alternative explanations by comparing the language development of monolingual and bilingual children.