Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 6, Issue 4, 2016

Research on second language acquisition has located individual variation, without clarifying whether language processing prompts learners to differ systematically in the production of syntax and morphology. To address this issue, the study examined the hypothesis on variation in Processability Theory. This theory predicts that, within second language development, individual learners vary systematically in how they respond to developmental conflicts. Specifically, learners have distinct types, which are evident in their use of options and 'trailers' (structures which emerge late). Longitudinal spoken data were collected over one academic year from six adolescent ESL learners. The results revealed different learner types in terms of syntactic options and trailers. However, the learners had less clear types for the morphological options, used unpredicted options, and lacked consistency in their use of syntactic and morphological trailers. The paper suggests that learners vary in processing due to diverse orientations towards the acquisition of either syntax or morphology.

This article examines the knowledge of topic and subject particles in heritage speakers and L2 learners of Japanese and Korean. We assume that topic marking is mediated at the syntax-information structure interface, while subject marking pertains to narrow syntax. In comparing phenomena mediated at different levels of linguistic organization, we provide evidence for the hypothesis that information structure-level phenomena present greater challenges for bilingual speakers than those mediated within syntax. While these results may be interpreted as evidence of generalized interface-related deficits, we show that such a global explanation is not supported. Instead, a more nuanced account is developed, based on the recognition of different types of topic (anaphoric, generic, and contrastive) and different types of subject (descriptive and exhaustive). Under the proposed account, non-native speakers’ deficits follow from three unrelated effects: the status of topic as an interface category, structural complexity, and the memory demands necessary for its interpretation in context.

Cross language priming in the visual modality is a well-established paradigm that offers insights into the representation of the bilingual mental lexicon; however, here we employ a novel form of priming, (i.e., an animacy decision task), to test previous outcomes. In addition, this study is the first to carry out an auditory priming task with bilingual Chinese-English speakers. Thus, we report on two experiments in which the participants decided whether visually (Experiment 1) or auditorily (Experiment 2) presented stimuli were exemplars of living entities or non-living things. The tasks allowed for addressing the priming effect, the priming asymmetry effect, and in turn allowed for testing the Revised Hierarchical Model ( Kroll & Stewart, 1994 ). Priming effects, where the related targets were responded to more rapidly compared to unrelated targets, were observed in both modalities in the L1 to L2 condition; however, no priming effects were found from L2 to L1. The findings obtained in this study support the use of primed animacy decision tasks in either modality as a valid tool for investigating bilingual lexical memory. Also, the observed priming effects allow for retaining the RHM in its original form.

This paper reports on interrogative (question) use in the informal spontaneous speech of near-native second-language French speakers. Interrogatives present considerable variation in French, and choices of interrogative form depend on semantics, communicative function, and register. Using a corpus of spontaneous conversations between near-native (NNSs) and native speakers (NSs), the inventory of interrogatives used is described; A detailed examination is then given of the question marker est-ce que (“is it that”), a candidate for overuse in L2 French ( Zwanziger 2008, p. 91 ). The results, from 825 occurrences of interrogative structures, reveal that the NNSs possess extremely similar inventories of interrogative forms to their NS interlocutors and that their interrogative choices are both communicatively and socio-stylistically appropriate. What appears quantitatively as overuse of est-ce que by two NNSs is, from a communicative point of view, entirely felicitous: Like NSs, the NNSs reserve est-ce que for several marked interrogative contexts. The results suggest that the NNSs successfully integrate syntactic, semantic, communicative, and sociolinguistic information in spontaneous conversation.