Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2017

This study is concerned with L3 acquisition in heritage speakers (HSs). The goals are to incorporate HSs into L3 acquisition research and investigate the role of language dominance for predicting L3 transfer. We analyze global accent in German-Turkish early bilinguals, HSs of Turkish, who acquired English as their L3. Twenty native-speaker judges determined accent strength and accent source in the speech of 18 bilinguals as well as 15 controls (L1 English, L1 German, L1 Turkish) when speaking English. Results show, firstly, that bilinguals are perceived as less accented than L1 Turkish speakers and similar to L1 German speakers. Secondly, unlike L1 controls, there is no uniform accent source for HSs when speaking their L3. Our results question the role of age of acquisition, while being generally consistent with the TPM. However, HSs seem to benefit from bilingual experience and structure-based transfer can be overpowered by high proficiency.

Using code-switching as a tool to illustrate how language experience modulates comprehension, the visual world paradigm was employed to examine the extent to which gender-marked Spanish determiners facilitate upcoming target nouns in a group of Spanish-English bilingual code-switchers. The first experiment tested target Spanish nouns embedded in a carrier phrase ( Experiment 1b ) and included a control Spanish monolingual group ( Experiment 1a ). The second set of experiments included critical trials in which participants heard code-switches from Spanish determiners into English nouns (e.g., la house) either in a fixed carrier phrase ( Experiment 2a ) or in variable and complex sentences ( Experiment 2b ). Across the experiments, bilinguals revealed an asymmetric gender effect in processing, showing facilitation only for feminine target items. These results reflect the asymmetric use of gender in the production of code-switched speech. The extension of the asymmetric effect into Spanish ( Experiment 1b ) underscores the permeability between language modes in bilingual code-switchers.

Discourse-level factors, such as event structure and the form of referential expressions, play an important role in native speakers’ referential processing. This paper presents an experiment with Japanese- and Korean-speaking learners of English, investigating the extent to which discourse-level biases that have gradient effects in L1 speakers are also implicated in L2 speakers’ coreference choices. Results from a story continuation task indicate that biases involving referential form were remarkably similar for L1 and L2 speakers. In contrast, event structure, indicated by perfective versus imperfective aspect, had a more limited effect on L2 speakers’ referential choices. The L2 results are discussed in light of existing accounts of L1 reference processing, which assume that referential choices are shaped by speakers’ continually updated expectations about what is likely to be mentioned next, and argued to reflect L2 speakers’ reduced reliance on expectations.

Although monolingual children do not generally calculate the upper-bounded scalar implicature (SI) associated with ‘some’ without additional support, monolingual Spanish-speaking children have been reported to do so with algunos (‘some’), and further distinguish algunos from unos. Given documented cross-linguistic influence in interface phenomena in bilinguals, we asked whether young Spanish-English bilinguals calculate SIs with algunos, or if there is an effect of acquiring languages with overlapping but diverging lexical entries. Two experiments reveal that not only do bilinguals inconsistently calculate SIs, Spanish monolinguals do not always either. In Experiment 1 , bilinguals did not calculate the SI associated with algunos. However, in Experiment 2 , which calls upon their awareness of speaker-hearer dynamics, they did. This research highlights the challenges arising from interpreting linguistic phenomena where lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information intersect, and is a call for further investigation with bilinguals in a rapidly growing area where bilingual research is lacking.