Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 8, Issue 3, 2018

Yucatec Maya differs from many better-known languages in that it has optional plural marking. In a psycholinguistic study of the production of optional plural marking with college-enrolled speakers of Yucatec Maya, Butler, Jaeger, and Bohnemeyer (2014) found that conceptual number information influences the production of optional plural marking. Since the participants in the Butler et al. (2014) study are not necessarily representative of speakers of Yucatec Maya, we examine the effects of conceptual number information, via the manipulation of set size, while factoring in the effects of age, education and language use variables on the production of optional plural morphology among bilingual speakers of Yucatec Maya and Spanish speaking in Yucatec Maya. In addition to finding effects of conceptual information, we found that education, but not age, significantly influences the production of plural morphology in Yucatec Maya. Participants with higher levels of education were more sensitive to conceptual number information.

The present exploratory study focuses on the effect of living outside the USA on the understanding of the meaning, the perceived offensiveness and the self-reported frequency of use of four English emotion-laden words of British origin and four English emotion-laden words of American origin among 556 first (L1) users of American English. Statistical analyses revealed that the scores of the Americans living in the UK or in non-English-speaking countries differed significantly from those of compatriots living in the USA. Positive relationships emerged between multilingualism and scores on the dependent variables for the four British words, but no link emerged between languages known and the dependent variables for the American words. This is interpreted as an indication that semantic representations of emotion-laden words originating from another variety of the L1 are relatively weaker and are more likely to shift as a result of exposure to their use in other varieties, and the knowledge of other languages.

The main objective of this study is to investigate the acoustic correlates of focus in late and simultaneous bilinguals of Hindi and Indian English (IE). The main acoustic correlates of focus in American/British English are duration, amplitude and F0 and in Hindi are duration, F0 excursion and post-focal pitch compression. In the present study, I look at duration, RMS amplitude and F0 excursion in broad focus, narrow focus and post-focus declarative present tense, past tense and perfect aspect (both transitive and intransitive verbs) Hindi and IE sentences, to explore if there are any differences in the two bilingual groups and to understand the acoustic correlates of focus in IE and Hindi.

Does early onset age of language learning in an informal setting always have a long-term advantage? We compared lexical access in adult heritage speakers of Spanish and late learners of Spanish in two word-production tasks, while also considering the speakers’ oral proficiency in their non-dominant language. In all speakers, word recall in the picture-naming task was less accurate and slower than in the translation task. Heritage speakers and late learners of high Spanish proficiency level were different only in the translation task, where learners were faster than heritage speakers, which may be explained by their experience with translation of visual input. These findings suggest that for a non-dominant language, an early onset of learning does not provide an advantage, at least when high-proficiency bilinguals, high-frequency words, and behavioral measures are concerned. Oral proficiency matters most, as it correlates with frequency of language use.

Language development in bilingual children is often related to differing levels of proficiency. Objective measurements of bilingual development include for example mean length of utterance (MLU). MLU is almost always calculated for each language context (including both monolingual and code-mixed utterances). In the current study, we analyzed the MLUs of three German-English bilingual children, aged 2;3–3;11 separately for the monolingual and code-mixed utterances. Our results showed that language preference was reflected in MLU values: the more children spoke in one language the higher the MLU was in that language. However, it was the mixed utterances that had the highest MLU for all three children. We support the results with a construction type analysis and suggest a potential usage-based explanation for these results based on individual differences in each child’s developmental inventory of words and constructions.