Sentence repetition task for European Portuguese: results from a study with monolingual and Portuguese-German bilingual children

Abstract

The Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) is an assessment tool for children’s language abilities, which has been used in various languages and speaker types. The present study adapted the LITMUS-SRT to European Portuguese (EP) and applied it to 43 monolingual and 25 bilingual heritage speakers of EP with German as societal language (aged 6 to 10 years), in order to evaluate their knowledge of various syntactic properties, which differ in their level of complexity. Additionally, it also assessed the effect of language experience variables—that is, richness of the heritage language (HL) input and cumulative amount of HL exposure—on the performance of the bilingual children in the task. Results demonstrate that group (monolingual vs. bilingual), the children’s age and the level of complexity (with three levels) predict children’s accuracy scores. Furthermore, it is particularly in the highest levels of complexity that the bilingual children show more variation and more protracted development, with clitics and subjunctives being the most challenging linguistic properties. As for the role of the input-related variables, richness of the HL input, but not cumulative amount of exposure, emerged as a significant predictor of the bilingual children’s accuracy.