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Title Morphosyntactic ability of Gender Marking in Urdu- English Simultaneous Bilinguals: A Psycholinguistics Investigation

Author(s) ALISHBA GULL

Abstract Title: Morphosyntactic Ability Of Gender Marking In Urdu-English Simultaneous Bilinguals: A Psycholinguistic Investigation Bilingualism is an important aspect of today’s bi/multilingual world community and empirical explorations into its various psycholinguistic mechanisms are crucial. In the context of Pakistan, the development of early bilingualism for children has lately become a trend among an ever-increasing number of parents and schools alike. The present study seeks to get empirical insights into the development of morphosyntactic development of Urdu-English early bilinguals. The study specifically aims at exploring the psycholinguistic mechanisms involved in the children’s acquisition of gender marking ability in two languages, Urdu and English, which have distinct gender systems. For this purpose, the data has been collected from a sample of 48 early bilinguals from three local schools of Bahawalpur. The selected participants were categorized into two groups on the basis of gender, boys and girls, and further into three age groups within the broader age bracket of 4 to 10 years to conduct a fine-grained analysis of morphosyntactic ability in relation to gender, age of acquisition and the sequence of language acquisition. To explore their morphosyntactic ability of gender marking, the data was gathered with the help of three psycholinguistic experimental tests, which included: grammatical judgment task, picture naming task and translation task. The analysis of the data revealed that for simultaneous bilinguals, there is a clear interference between two distinct gender systems of Urdu and English. The results showed that simultaneous Urdu-English bilingual children face difficulty in assigning gender to Urdu inanimate nouns, which is clearly an influence of English gender system where inanimate nouns are gender neutral. The results of the study have important implications for elementary schools as well as for parents who encourage the children’s active use of one language and downplay the other instead of helping the children maintain a balance in the use of both the languages

Type Thesis/Dissertation

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Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2023-12-17

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