Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2021

Bilinguals’ attitudes toward their languages can be a major source of linguistic variability. However, the effect of attitudes on crosslinguistic phonetic interactions in bilinguals remains largely unexplored. This study investigated the possibility of such effects in Cantonese-English bilinguals in Hong Kong (n = 26). Participants produced near-homophones in each language on separate days. Formant values of Cantonese [ɐ] and English [ʌ] and degrees of diphthongization of Cantonese [o] and [ai], and English [oʊ] and [ai], were analyzed as a function of language proficiency, use, and language attitude scores drawn from a background questionnaire. Participants’ attitudes toward Cantonese were predictive of the acoustic difference between similar Cantonese and Hong Kong English (HKE) vowels: More Cantonese-oriented speakers produced greater acoustic distance between crosslinguistically similar vowels. No effects of English attitudes, proficiency, or use were found. These results demonstrate that bilinguals’ attitude toward their native language can affect the degree of phonetic similarity between the two languages they speak.

Although SLA research has extensively investigated the role of lexical aspect in L2 acquisition of tense-aspect marking, the role of L1 is not yet fully understood. This paper investigates the effect of cross-linguistic variation in lexical aspect and explores how the learning of lexical aspect interacts with the acquisition of aspectual morphology, using oral picture-description and written judgment tasks. 391 learners of Japanese (L1 English, Chinese, and Korean) participated in the study. The results show that L2 learners have problems in rejecting incorrect L2 aspectual structures (but not in accepting correct ones) when such structures involve L1–L2 discrepancy in lexical aspect. The results also confirmed a strong L1 effect at the level of surface inflected verbal form, showing significantly higher accuracy for items for which direct translation yields correct meaning than those that do not. It is argued that L1 transfer may be playing an important role in the L2 acquisition of aspect in that both positive and negative transfer collectively determine the order of acquisition predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis.

Definite and demonstrative determiners in English share the same central semantics of uniqueness (e.g., Hawkins, 1991; Ionin, Baek, Kim, Ko, & Wexler, 2012; Wolter, 2006), but the computation of the semantics is constrained by different discourse conditions and determined by pragmatic knowledge, which pertains to the interface between semantics and pragmatics. This paper investigates whether L2 learners may have persistent difficulty in acquiring properties involving the semantics-pragmatics interface, by exploring the acquisition of L2 English definite and demonstrative determiners by advanced and near-native L1 Chinese learners of English. It also examines whether acquisition results are influenced by the learners’ L1 Chinese, which lacks an article system but allows demonstrative determiners. The results from a forced-choice written task show that advanced learners were unable to distinguish between the two determiners in different discourse conditions; near-native-level L1 Chinese learners displayed a native-like preference for the definite determiner, but not for the demonstrative determiner. It is argued that convergence at the semantics-pragmatics interface is not impossible for L2 learners, but (un)acquirability may be constrained by asymmetries in the L1–L2 realizations of semantics-pragmatics mappings. The findings raise interesting questions for future research into factors that can influence the acquisition of external interfaces.

This study investigated the extent to which phonological and orthographic overlap between the two languages of bilinguals predicts word processing abilities in their dominant and non-dominant languages. Forty-four English-dominant L1 English-L2 Spanish speakers and Spanish-dominant Spanish heritage speakers performed a lexical decision task while reading words in English and Spanish. We calculated orthographic and phonological similarity of cognate and noncognate words using the Levenshtein distance measure. Results showed that both bilingual groups benefited from orthographic similarity when reading Spanish and English words, whereas a facilitative effect was restricted to Spanish words that shared phonology across languages. These findings suggest a different contribution of phonological and orthographic similarity in bilingual word recognition, independently of language dominance.

Children who have knowledge of two languages may show better phonological awareness than their monolingual peers (e.g. Bruck & Genesee, 1995). It remains unclear how much bilingual experience is needed for such advantages to appear, and whether differences in language or cognitive skills alter the relation between bilingualism and phonological awareness. These questions were investigated in this cross-sectional study. Participants (n = 294; 4–7 year-olds, in the first three grades of primary school) were Dutch-speaking pupils attending mainstream monolingual Dutch primary schools or early-English schools providing English lessons from grade 1, and simultaneous Dutch-English bilinguals. We investigated phonological awareness (rhyming, phoneme blending, onset phoneme identification, and phoneme deletion) and its relation to age, Dutch vocabulary, English vocabulary, working memory and short-term memory, and the balance between Dutch and English vocabulary. Small significant (α < .05) effects of bilingualism were found on onset phoneme identification and phoneme deletion, but post-hoc comparisons revealed no robust pairwise differences between the groups. Furthermore, effects of bilingualism sometimes disappeared when differences in language or memory skills were taken into account. Learning two languages simultaneously is not beneficial to – and importantly, also not detrimental to – phonological awareness.