Tvåspråkiga skolbarns verbanvändning i svenska

This thesis is a study of 20 simultaneous bilingual (Finnish - Swedish) children's use of verbs in some oral accounts. The youngsters are aged between 10 years and 10 months and 13 years and are compared with a group of monolingual Swedish children of the same age and similar socio-economic background. The focus of the investigation is the youngsters' verb use but the number of tokens and distribution between nouns, adjectives and verbs are also examined. The material for the study consists of recorded interviews in which three stories are re-narrated orally. The findings show both similarities and differences in the various groups' use of verbs. The group of simultaneous bilingual children used a significantly lower number of tokens; it had a significantly smaller proportion of very frequent verbs and a larger proportion of less frequent verbs as well as a significantly larger proportion of concrete physical action verbs and a lower proportion of mental and grammatical verbs. No significant distinctions could be found regarding the distribution of word classes (nouns, adjectives and verbs), verb variation, the proportion of verbs with many basic meanings, the proportion of phrasal verbs or the number of unique phrasal verbs. Deviations within the groups are, however, large especially in the simultaneous bilingual group and, within the simultaneous bilingual group, several individuals can be found whose performance is fully commensurate with or above the average for the Swedish control group. What has been examined is, also, only a small part of the youngsters' communicative competence. The findings sbow that, with regard to certain linguistic variables studied, the simultaneous bilingual group is somewhat behind the monolingual Swedish control group regarding linguistic development. This discrepancy is not, however, consistent and this small measure of retardation may be expected to have evened out in adulthood.