Realization of English past tense by Chinese–English heritage bilingual children

Abstract Previous research has shown that past-tense inflection is particularly difficult for child learners of English whose L1 is Chinese, with persistent omission often attributed to cross-linguistic influence (CLI). Building on this literature, this study investigates how Chinese–English bilingual children in the United States (US, n = 4) realize English past tense in naturalistic production between 2;8 and 6;11, focusing on CLI from their heritage language. We examined 11,682 utterances and identified 1,052 lexical, copular, and auxiliary verb tokens in obligatory contexts for past-tense marking. All four children displayed optional past-tense inflection in some or all observational periods, along with overregularization and a previously unreported pattern of overmarking. The production patterns suggest that the persistent difficulty of the Chinese-L1 learners in an English-dominant context is a result of the lack of tense marking in Chinese and the overall isolating typology of the language, rather than transfer from specific phonological, morphosyntactic, or lexical elements. Our findings show that heritage bilingual acquisition is a manifestation of language contact at the individual level, and shed new light on how language contact may drive language change at the communal level.