Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 12, Issue 6, 2022

How parents talk to young children matters to language and cognitive development. In the early years the quantity, quality, and diversity inherent in language from parents in the home predict differences in vocabulary knowledge, school readiness, and later academic achievement. However, most of what is known about child-directed speech (CDS) comes from studies of monolingual parents, and little is known about features of speech from bilingual parents. Here, we asked whether degree of bilingualism assessed within a single parent might be positively associated with CDS features that are known to facilitate children’s lexical and grammatical structures across languages – parental partial repetitions. During unscripted narrations (n = 91) of a picture book to their toddlers in English, mothers who reported being more bilingually balanced used a higher proportion of self-repetitions (both single words and 2-word combinations) within a brief time-frame. At the same time, more bilingual mothers preserved the same degree of lexical diversity as more monolingual mothers. The results obtained even accounting for differences in socio-economic status. These findings are discussed in terms of adaptive strategies that bilingual parents may consciously or unconsciously adopt in bilingual language development

This study examined whether Korean learners of English attained native-like performance in English focus prosody by conducting production and perception experiments using digit strings. Language learners were classified into advanced-, intermediate-, and low-level groups according to their proficiency and compared with native speakers. Native speakers’ focus prosody was clearly prominent in the focus positions, and their post-focus positions were considerably compressed. Their focused digits were easy to detect, resulting in a 97% identification rate. Although advanced-level speakers produced acoustic cues quite similar to those of native speakers, their post-focus production did not resemble that of native speakers. Their identification rate was 81%, 16% lower than that of native speakers. Neither intermediate- nor low-level speakers’ focus-cueing changes were distinguished whatsoever in the focus and post-focus positions. Their identification rates were just over 10%, similar to the level of chance in a 10-digit string, implying that their focus productions were not sufficiently salient to be recognized in the experiment. The results suggest that second language acquisition is hindered by a negative transfer between English and Korean. The acquisition of second language focus prosody proceeds slowly; second language learners approach native-like proficiency once they become advanced.

This paper investigates the strategies involved in gender assignment in Spanish-Basque mixed Determiner Phrases (DPs) with a gendered Spanish determiner (elM /laF) and a Basque ungendered noun. Previous studies on Spanish-Basque mixed DPs have revealed conflicting results regarding the determining factor affecting gender assignment, namely, phonological ending vs. analogical gender. We designed a forced-switch elicitation task in order to elicit mixed DPs with a Spanish determiner and a Basque noun (controlled for both phonological vs. analogical cues). Thirty highly proficient Spanish-Basque bilinguals with different profiles and socio­linguistic backgrounds participated in the study. Three cues were significant in the selection of the Spanish M/F determiner: the analogical gender and two phonological cues, the word ending and the root ending of the Basque noun. Further statistical analyses revealed participants’ L1 as a strong factor in the variability attested: bilinguals with Spanish as (one of) their L1(s) rely predominantly on the analogical criterion, whereas speakers with only Basque as L1 follow mainly the phonological criterion. Overall, this study provides an explanation for the previous conflicting results and highlights the fact that bilinguals may use different strategies depending on their bilingual profile and the morpho-phonological properties of the languages in contact.

Sound patterns in heritage languages are often highly variable, potentially with influences from majority languages. Yet, the core phonological system of the heritage language tends to remain stable. This article considers variation in the phonetic and phonological patterns of /r/ in American Norwegian heritage language speakers from neighboring communities in western Wisconsin, in the Upper Midwestern United States. Drawing on acoustic data from speakers born between 1879 and 1957, I examine the distribution of four rhotic allophones, including an English-like approximant, over time. These data reveal an increase of approximants that is structured within the Norwegian phonological system and its processes. Furthermore, analyzing these changes with the proposed modular framework provides clarity for how heritage language sound systems do and do not change under contact and contributes to our understanding of the asymmetric phonetic and phonological heritage language patterns.

This paper presents an eye-tracking study using the Visual World Paradigm that tests whether participants are able to access gender information on definite articles and deploy it to facilitate lexical retrieval of subsequent nouns. A comparison of heritage speakers of Spanish with control monolingual speakers of Spanish suggests that the heritage speakers’ performance on this task is qualitatively similar to that of the baseline. This suggests that, despite non-target-like performance in offline tasks targeting gender production and comprehension, heritage speakers of Spanish can use gender in a target-like manner in online tasks. In line with proposals put forth by Grüter et al. (2012) and Montrul et al. (2014), a preliminary comparison with previous work on L2 learners (Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2010; Grüter et al., 2012; Dussias et al., 2013) provides tentative support for the idea that the nature of early language learning is crucial in developing the ability to use grammatical gender to facilitate lexical retrieval (Grüter et al., 2012; Montrul et al., 2014).