Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 11, Issue 6, 2021

Adopting a usage-based perspective, the present study assesses the mental lexicon of Turkish heritage speakers in the UK (HSs, n = 31) regarding the productive use of formulaic inflectional suffix templates and the level of sophistication of the lemmas produced in free speech. We additionally explore input-related predictors of this performance by comparing HS performance to that of a group of previous generation immigrant bilinguals (IBs, n = 61), who are representative input providers, and of a group of monolinguals (n = 44). The results show that overall, both the HSs and IBs diverge from the monolinguals in that they use nominal suffix sequences less productively and rely on less sophisticated nominal lemmas. Their verbal productivity performance, however, remains intact. We argue that altered input results in a performance which diverges from that of the monolinguals but converges on the immigrant variety. The individual variability is partly explained by the amount of L1 passive exposure, indicating that the HSs are not sensitive only to the changes in the input available to them but also to the amount of it. These findings provide new insights into the line of research that describes HSs as incomplete due to their L1-divergent skills in comparison to a monolingual baseline.

The present study investigated cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in the word order of Dutch-English bilingual children, using elicited production and acceptability judgment tasks. The goal was to examine whether monolingual and bilingual children produced and/or accepted V2 word orders in English, as in * Yesterday painted she an apple. We investigated whether the likelihood of CLI was related to language dominance, age at testing, and the degree of surface overlap (i.e., V2 word orders with auxiliaries versus main verbs).

Even though none of the participants produced V2 word orders in English, in the acceptability judgment task bilingual children were more likely to accept V2 word orders than monolingual peers. Whilst monolinguals sometimes accepted V2 word orders with auxiliaries, bilinguals did so significantly more often (constituting a quantitative difference) and with main verbs, too (implying a qualitative difference). Therefore, we conclude that CLI can occur independently of surface overlap and that it can lead to both quantitative and qualitative differences between bilinguals and monolinguals. The likelihood of CLI was predicted by language dominance, but not by age. Some bilinguals still accepted V2 word orders at age ten, suggesting that in some cases CLI may be more persistent than previously thought.

This study deals with the syntactic (non-)derivational relationship of English dative alternation (DA) –double object constructions (DOCs) and to/for-datives–, as seen in the spontaneous production of English-Spanish bilinguals when compared to English monolinguals. While a chronological progression and a difference in use between the two English DA constructions could suggest a syntactic-derivational relationship between DOCs and to/for-datives, a fairly similar emergence and a possibly similar rate of use could point to the two constructions not displaying a syntactic-derivational status. We also explore whether English-Spanish bilinguals show divergent developmental paths when compared to English monolinguals. To address these issues, we analyze data from nine English-Spanish bilingual children and twelve English monolingual children, along with the adults interacting with them. The analysis shows that both DA structures emerge at a similar age, which suggests they are not syntactically derived from one another. Despite these differences, the later onset and the lower incidence of to/for-datives could be associated with the case and theta role mediated properties of prepositions as well as with the frequency of exposure to DA in the adults’ speech. As no differences appear between bilinguals and monolinguals, transfer from Spanish does not seem to be an issue.

Previous studies have observed different gender assignment strategies for English nouns in Spanish-English code-switching (CS). However, these studies have not investigated the role of noun gender canonicity of the Spanish equivalent, they have only examined participants in bilingual speaker mode, and most studies have not explored the role of bilingual language experience. The current study compares gender assignment by heritage speakers of Spanish in a monolingual speaker mode and a bilingual speaker mode, considering the role of noun gender canonicity and CS experience. Results revealed a language mode effect, where participants used significantly more masculine determiners with the same feminine nouns in the CS session than those in the Spanish monolingual session where they used a feminine determiner. Further evidence of a language mode effect was found in the effect of noun canonicity and bilingual language experience. Noun canonicity was only significant in the Spanish monolingual session, where participants used significantly more masculine determiners with non-canonical nouns. Bilingual language experience was only significant in the CS session, where regular codeswitchers used more masculine default determiners than infrequent codeswitchers and non-codeswitchers, while in Spanish-only, all these groups behaved similarly.

Child-level factors such as input quantity and quality have received little attention by studies of bilingual language acquisition in situations of societal bilingualism. The present study addresses this gap by investigating the acquisition of quantified partitivity in Catalan-Spanish bilingualism. The two languages present different licensing conditions for noun ellipsis in quantified partitive objects: Catalan requires quantitative clitic en whereas Spanish requires only the quantifier. Bilingual participants (N = 338), ages 4–9, were administered two Oral Production Tasks, one for each language. Analyses of participants’ responses showed that a different combination of child-level factors accounted for their performance in each language, revealing dominance effects. Once participants were classified into three groups (Catalan-dominant, Balanced bilingual, and Spanish-dominant) according to their language dominance, between-group differences were found in each language with respect to the acquisition timeline of the respective structure.