Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 9, Issue 4-5, 2019

We sought to describe the strategies used by 2L1 and L2 Basque-French bilingual children and monolingual Basque children to express subject-agent function in a free elicitation context in Basque. Based on a three-year longitudinal study, the analysis focused on transitive constructions requiring a subject-agent noun marked for ergative case. The results showed that the children mastered production of the ergative case marker at different ages, and used different psycholinguistic strategies to refer to the subject-agent. The majority of the bilingual children favoured topological strategy (i.e., marking of the subject-agent in the first position through subject-verb-object word order). However, the children with L1 Basque seemed to engage more in morphological strategy, through the use of the nominal ergative suffix. These data allowed us to discuss variations in the performance of bilingual children in light of the cue cost and cue validity concepts elaborated by the Competition Model applied to language production.

Bilingual language control has previously been tested separately in tasks of language comprehension and language production. Whereas these studies have suggested that local control processes are selectively recruited during mixed-language production, the present study investigated whether measures of global control show the same dependence on modality, or are shared across modalities. Thirty-eight Dutch-French bilingual young adults participated by completing two tasks of bilingual language control in both modalities. Global accuracy on mixed-language comprehension was related to mixing costs on bilingual verbal fluency, but only when compared to the L2-baseline. Global performance on mixed-language production was related to forward (L1-to-L2) switch costs. Finally, a significant correlation was found between the mixing cost on verbal fluency and forward switch costs on the comprehension task. The results are interpreted as evidence for the involvement of monitoring processes in bilingual language control across modality. The results also highlight the relevance of language switch directionality.

We investigate reference production in bilingual children. Based on Kibrik (2011), we analyze the production of referring expressions in discourse in terms of activation of a referent. We propose a novel approach, which calculates activation by taking into account different activation-lending factors and their respective weight. This allows us to compare the activation encoded by referring expressions across languages and groups of speakers, and to run correlational analyses with the speakers’ cognitive profiles. In particular, the study addresses the correlation between activation and lexical processing among bilinguals, based on the distribution of referring expressions in narratives by 20 German-Greek bilingual children, compared to their monolingual peers. We found that bilingual pronouns correspond to a lower activation than monolingual ones. Speed of lexical retrieval is a predictor of the bilingual performance. Our model of analysis accounts for how reference production varies across individuals and which cognitive mechanisms underlie this variation.

Bilinguals show a large gap in their expressive-receptive abilities, in both languages. To date, most studies have examined lexical processing. The current study aimed to assess comprehension and production of verb agreement, i.e., grammatical processing, in bilinguals, and to examine the factors that might modulate them: exposure, age and language-specific morphological complexity. Twenty balanced Basque-Spanish bilinguals (10 adults and 10 children) were assessed on comprehension and production of subject-verb agreement in both languages and object-verb agreement in Basque. Twenty age-matched Spanish-dominant Basque-Spanish bilinguals were assessed in Spanish only. The results revealed a consistent gap in Basque in both children and adults, with an advantage for comprehension. In Spanish, a gap appeared in children only, with an advantage for production. The gap size did not vary with the amount of language exposure but with age and morphological complexity, suggesting that these factors modulate bilinguals’ grammatical processing.

Early Spanish-English bilinguals and English controls were tested on the production and perception of negative, short-lag, and long-lag Voice Onset Time (VOT), VOT types spanning the Spanish and English phonetic categories: phonologically, negative and short-lag VOT stops are distinct phonemes in Spanish, but realizations of voiced stops in English. Dominance was critical: more English-dominant bilinguals produced more short-lag VOT stops in response to negative VOT stimuli, and were also less accurate than more balanced bilinguals at discriminating negative from short-lag VOT. Bilinguals performed similarly to monolinguals overall, but they produced more negative VOT tokens and shorter short-lag VOT in response to negative VOT. Their productions were also less well correlated with perception and showed more variation between individuals. These results highlight the variable nature of bilingual production and perception, and demonstrate the need to consider language dominance, individual variation, as well as modalities and tasks when studying bilinguals.

This study investigates 37 child heritage speakers’ direct object (DO) clitics in Spanish. Results from a production task show that DO expression versus omission was related to Spanish vocabulary: the lower the vocabulary score, the more omitted DOs. In contrast, DO clitic gender was related to English: children who used more English in the home and who had higher English vocabulary scores produced more gender mismatches, most notably lo referring to feminine referents. Results from a comprehension task suggest that children do not attend to clitic gender for referent identification. We argue that the disambiguation function of DO clitic gender, which is infrequent in discourse, may take a long time to develop. Overall, the study suggests that the extent to which restricted input and crosslinguistic influence affect child heritage speakers’ minority language grammar may be mediated by the nature of the linguistic phenomenon in question.

Expressive-receptive gaps in lexical abilities have been documented for bilingual children, but few studies have investigated whether a similar gap is observed at the grammatical level. The current study assessed grammatical abilities through sentence production and comprehension tasks in both languages in 17 Basque-Spanish simultaneous bilingual 6- through 9-year-olds (both languages acquired before three years of age). The children scored lower in Basque than Spanish for sentence production, but no significant differences were found for sentence comprehension. While an expressive-receptive gap was found for both languages, this gap was larger in Basque than in Spanish. Object-verb agreement errors were especially prevalent in Basque production, possibly because verbs in Spanish only agree with the subject. These results demonstrate that expressive-receptive gaps are also observed in bilingual children’s grammatical abilities and may vary depending on the structural similarity between the two languages.

In Papiamento-Dutch bilingual speech, the nominal construction is a potential ‘conflict site’ if there is an adjective from one language and a noun from the other. Adjective position is pre-nominal in Dutch (cf. rode wijn ‘red wine’) but post-nominal in Papiamento (cf. biña kòrá ‘wine red’). We test predictions concerning the mechanisms underpinning word order in noun-adjective switches derived from three accounts: (i) the adjective determines word order (Cantone & MacSwan, 2009), (ii) the matrix language determines word order (Myers-Scotton, 1993, 2002), and (iii) either order is possible (Di Sciullo, 2014). An analysis of spontaneous Papiamento-Dutch code-switching production (Parafita Couto & Gullberg, 2017) could not distinguish between these predictions. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to measure online comprehension of code-switched utterances. We discuss how our results inform the three theoretical accounts and we relate them to syntactic coactivation and the production-comprehension link.

The present study explores the acquisition of the Russian accusative [acc] case inflections in two groups of bilingual children (Russian-Dutch and Russian-Hebrew) who acquire Russian as their Heritage Language (HL) and two groups of monolingual Russian-speaking children within the Unified Competition Model (MacWhinney, 2008, 2012). Seventy-two typically developing children participated in the study. Children’s performance on three tasks was compared: elicited production, forced-choice comprehension and sentence repetition.

The current study confirmed the predictions of the Unified Competition Model: monolingual children view the [acc] case inflection as a reliable cue. Conversely, bilingual children showed lower accuracy on nouns which require the use of a dedicated [acc] marker. Similarly, the percentage of children manifesting sensitivity to [acc] case cue was low in bilinguals. The findings of the study extend the Unified Competition Model to patterns of HL acquisition in bilinguals. Cue detection in HL for bilinguals is challenged when exposure is limited.