Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2018

Our study investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of scalar implicatures some and all. We set out to answer two research questions based on three theoretical accounts, the lexical, pragmatic and syntactic accounts. In an experiment we include English and Japanese native speakers, and intermediate and advanced Japanese L2 learners of English. We used quantifiers some and all in ‘Yes/No’ questions in a context with sets of toy fruits, where pragmatic answers are expected, e.g., a ‘No’ response to the question ‘Are some of the strawberries in the red circle?’ (when a set of 14/14 strawberries are placed inside a red circle). Our individual results indicate that L2 learners are generally more pragmatic in their responses than native English speakers. But, there are neither significant differences between groups nor significant differences between L2 proficiency levels. We consider the implications of our findings for the acquisition of L2 semantics and pragmatics.

This study examines three L3 transfer proposals, namely the L1 Factor ( Hermas, 2010 , 2014a , 2014b ), the CEM ( Flynn et al., 2004 ) and the TPM ( Rothman, 2010 , 2011 , 2013 , 2015 ) as well as investigates the role of the language of dominance in L3 acquisition of English attributive adjectives. Three groups of bilinguals took part in this study: L1 Mazandarani/L2 Persian, with Mazandarani as the dominant language of communication, L1 Mazandarani/L2 Persian, with Persian as the dominant language of communication and L1 Persian/L2 Mazandarani, with Persian as the dominant language of communication. The results of a grammaticality judgment task and an element rearrangement task show that the predictions of the above-mentioned L3 transfer proposals were not realized. Instead, the dominant language of communication turns out to be the main source of syntactic crosslinguistic influence at the initial stages of L3 acquisition, irrespective of its status as an L1 or L2.

The strategies used to signal information focus — the non-presupposed part of a sentence — in Spanish are under debate. The literature suggests that focus must appear rightmost; however, empirical evidence shows that speakers also realize focus in-situ. Moreover, there is limited research investigating the effects of language variety or knowledge of another language on focus marking. We address these questions via a paced elicited production task, testing speakers who learned Spanish naturalistically in infancy, including two groups of monolinguals and two groups of Spanish/English bilinguals: (a) Spanish natives who learned English after childhood, and (b) early bilinguals exposed to English in early childhood (heritage speakers). Confirming previous empirical studies, results show that all participant groups choose a similar range of focus-marking strategies, vastly preferring in-situ marking with rightmost marking used rarely. Results challenge both theoretical accounts of Spanish focus realization and expectations of special vulnerability at the syntax-discourse interface for bilinguals.

In a series of five experiments with 31 Korean heritage children, we show that knowledge of case and the ability to use it must be evaluated with careful attention to multiple factors that can influence access to morphological information in the course of comprehension and production. The first two experiments, which compared the canonical SOV pattern with the non-canonical OSV pattern, employed picture-selection comprehension tasks to assess knowledge of case. Poor performance on OSV sentences was mitigated by experimental manipulations that either enhanced the perceptual salience of case or provided felicitous conditions for the use of non-canonical word order. The next three experiments, all involving production tasks, revealed that many children who failed to demonstrate knowledge of case in the comprehension tasks actually produced nominative and accusative case correctly, thereby revealing their knowledge of this morphosyntactic system.