Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 13, Issue 6, 2023

Schwartz and Sprouse (2021) argue against property-by-property Transfer (Westergaard, 2021a, b) and for wholesale transfer (Rothman, 2015) into a third language grammar by questioning the cognitive plausibility of “extracting a proper subpart from the … grammar and using that proper sub-system as the basis for a new cognitive state.” I will argue that the insights from the approaches of López (2020); Lightfoot (2020); Dresher (2018), and Westergaard (2021a) when applied to empirical data from L3 English data from L1 Arabic/L2 French speakers, give us reason to question Schwartz and Sprouse’s defence of wholesale transfer, and its typological underpinnings. We can set the study of L3A in a larger context which can unify domains such as the acquisition of phonology and syntax via a unified approach to parsing. By invoking an underspecified, minimal UG, primary linguistic data, and domain-general third factors which act in concert to parse the E-language to select structures, we can capture the underlying similarity of first, second, and third language acquisition. Parsing proceeds in an error-driven fashion, structure by structure, drawing on the Integrated I-language and UG options found in a Repository. In essence, this approach renders the wholesale/property-by-property distinction a false dichotomy.

This paper investigates how late L2 learners resolve filler-gap dependencies (FGD) in real-time and how proficiency and working memory (WM) modulate their brain responses in an event-related potential (ERP) experiment. A group of intermediate to highly proficient Mandarin Chinese learners of English listened to sentences such as “The zebra that the hippo kissed *the camel on the nose ran far away,” in which the extra noun phrase “the camel” created a ‘filled-gap’ effect. The results show that although L2 behavioral responses are comparable to native speakers and are positively correlated with proficiency and WM span, the brain responses to the filled gap are qualitatively different. Importantly, L2 processing patterns did not become more nativelike with higher proficiency levels or greater WM capacity. Specifically, while the native speakers exhibited a P600 typically observed for syntactic violations and repair, the L2 group produced a prefrontal-central positivity. Similar ERPs have previously been reported to reflect domain-general attentional and non-structural-based processes, suggesting that the L2 group has a reduced sensitivity to structural requirements for gap positing in the online resolution of FGDs. Our findings are discussed in light of various proposals accounting for L1-L2 processing differences, including the Shallow Structure Hypothesis.

Naturalistic production research has reported that, unlike monolingual peers, children acquiring Spanish as a heritage language omit Differential Object Marking (DOM) with animate objects since the earliest stages of language development. However, the previous studies investigating longitudinal monolingual and bilingual corpora cannot be compared to each other given their different treatment of language-internal variation in DOM use along the animacy scale. Whereas monolingual results excluded contexts predicted to be variable, bilingual results combined them with categorical contexts increasing the rate of “errors” in the bilingual group. This study reexamines naturalistic production by monolingual and early bilingual children as well as by their caregivers using a common methodology that distinguishes categorical from variable DOM contexts. The results indicate that longitudinal corpora covering child heritage speakers’ development up to age three do not show evidence of greater omission of DOM compared to monolingual children once variability along the animacy scale is accounted for. By contrast, young monolingual and bilingual children’s use of Spanish DOM seems target-like based on their input.

Although the question of whether and how bilingualism affects executive functions has been extensively debated, less attention has been paid to the cognitive abilities of speakers of different varieties of the same language, in linguistic situations such as bidialectalism and diglossia. Similarly to the bilingual situation, in bidialectalism and diglossia speakers have two language varieties that are active at the same time. However, these situations have been argued to potentially provide varied, and possibly fewer, opportunities for mixing or switching between the varieties, which may in turn lead to different cognitive outcomes than those reported in bilingualism. Here we review the available evidence on the effects of bidialectalism and diglossia on cognition, and evaluate it in relation to theories of the effects of bilingualism on cognition. We conclude that investigations of bilingualism, bidialectalism and diglossia must take into account the conversational context and, in particular, the opportunities for language switching that this affords.

Proficient first-language (L1) readers of alphabetic languages that are read left-to-right typically have a perceptual span of 3–4 characters to the left and 14–15 characters to the right of the foveal fixation. Given that second-language (L2) processing requires more cognitive resources, we hypothesize that L2ers will have a smaller perceptual span than L1ers, and may rely on a compensatory risky reading strategy with a more symmetrical perceptual span similar to that seen in older L1 adults. Here, we test the size and symmetry of the perceptual span in German L1/English L2ers reading in English. We manipulate the amount of information available (3,6,9 characters-left/3,9,15 characters-right) during reading, and also account for the influence of English skills. Results show that L2ers benefit from an increase of window size from 3 to 6 characters to the left, and from 3 to 9 characters to the right, with higher-skilled L2ers further benefiting from an increase to 15 characters to the right. Contrary to our hypothesis, proficient L2ers exhibit an asymmetric perceptual span similar to college-aged L1ers and do not employ a compensatory risky reading strategy. This suggests that L1 and L2 language processing are not qualitatively different, but are rather modulated by individual differences.