- Home
- e-Journals
- Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
- Fast Track Listing
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
1 - 20 of 26 results
-
-
Protracted development in the heritage lexicon
Author(s): Mengyao Shang, Lucy Zhao, Virginia Yip and Ziyin MaiAvailable online: 15 March 2024More LessAbstractResearch on heritage language acquisition at the school age has shown protracted development and early stabilisation in morphosyntax and the lexicon. Our study examined the properties of resultative verb compound (RVC), a structure at the crossroads of the lexicon and morphosyntax, in second-generation child heritage speakers in the UK who had continuous input in Mandarin Chinese since birth. We analysed three subclasses of RVCs produced by the heritage children (n = 27, age 4–14) and their parents (n = 18) in an oral narration task and compared them with those by children in Beijing (n = 48, age 4–9) from existing databases. Our results show that the heritage children produced RVCs quite frequently and felicitously yet highly repetitively and conservatively, with a remarkably large proportion of their RVCs consisting of a strongly lexicalised subclass with direct lexical equivalents in English. Correlational analyses show that the heritage children’s RVCs improve with age, rather than provision of RVC in the parental input, indicating the role of cumulative input in RVC acquisition. Overall, the development of RVC in heritage Mandarin is delayed rather than stabilised or attrited, supporting the lexical account for grammatical vulnerabilities in proficient heritage speakers.
-
-
-
Individual variation in contact effects – stability, convergence, and divergence
Author(s): Marie Barking, Maria Mos and Ad BackusAvailable online: 01 March 2024More LessAbstractIn this study, we investigate the contact effects of stability, convergence, and divergence regarding the use of the same linguistic construction in the same contact situation. To do that, we collected experimental production and judgment data by native German speakers living in the Netherlands regarding their usage of the complementizer um ‘to’ in German and compared those data to those of a control group of German speakers not in contact with Dutch. The results show that most speakers show evidence for some contact-induced language change in their German. At the same time, speakers seem to experience different contact effects, demonstrating that it is not the structural properties of the construction that result in one effect over the other, but rather factors that pertain to the individual speakers. In particular, we argue that speakers can either focus on the similarities or on the differences between their languages, to some extent driven by their attitudes towards their languages and language change, and then over-generalize these similarities or differences to new contexts. Overall, this result clearly underlines the importance of focusing on individual speakers as the initiators of language change, which is in line with a usage-based approach.
-
-
-
Pronoun interpretation in Italian
Author(s): Lydia White, Heather Goad, Guilherme Duarte Garcia, Natália Brambatti Guzzo, Liz Smeets and Jiajia SuAvailable online: 08 February 2024More LessAbstractWe explore potential effects of prosody on pronoun interpretation in Italian, building on previous research which has shown that second language learners/users (L2ers) assign non-target interpretations to overt pronouns. We investigate effects of contrastive stress and pause, proposing that these will result in changes to default antecedent preferences for overt and null pronouns, for L2ers and for native speakers. An experiment was conducted, involving English-speaking L2ers of Italian and Italian native speakers. Participants were presented with auditory stimuli like Lorenzo ha scritto a Roberto quando Ø/lui si è trasferito a Torino ‘Lorenzo wrote to Roberto when (he) moved to Turin’ and indicated their preferred antecedent for the pronoun. Overt versus null pronouns, presence versus absence of stress on overt pronouns, and presence versus absence of pause between clauses were manipulated. The results yielded significant differences for antecedent choices between null and overt pronouns, consistent with earlier literature. In addition, stress was significant for both groups. Implications of a prosodic approach to ambiguity resolution are discussed.
-
-
-
How syntactic gradience in L1 affects L3 acquisition
Author(s): Sylwiusz Żychliński, Anna Skałba, Magdalena Wrembel and Kamil KaźmierskiAvailable online: 22 December 2023More LessAbstractThe article reports on a longitudinal study of syntactic cross-linguistic influence (CLI) among L1 Polish learners of L2 English and L3 Norwegian. The study mainly aimed to determine the influence of gradience in L1 on third language acquisition. To this end, four syntactic properties were tested, two of which exhibit similarity between Polish and Norwegian (subject-oriented possessive pronouns and adverb placement), and the other two – between English and Norwegian (definite and indefinite articles). A group of 24 learners of Norwegian participated in an acceptability judgment task, which was administered at three data collection times in all three languages. It aimed not only to determine the presence (and sources) of CLI, but also to observe how gradience in L1 affects the assessment of equivalent properties in L3. In order to assess the role played by gradience, the trilinguals’ performance was compared to that of a control group of English-Norwegian bilinguals. The data were analyzed with mixed-effects ordinal logistic regression modelling, which showed statistically significant differences in the ratings of articles between the two groups. We attribute this finding to gradient acceptability characterizing subject-oriented pronouns and adverb placement in Polish, which is a potential source of non-facilitative CLI.
-
-
-
Heritage speaker pragmatics
Author(s): Marina Avramenko and Natalia MeirAvailable online: 12 December 2023More LessAbstractThe current study investigated request production in Russian as a Heritage language (HL), with a special focus on the role of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) of the majority societal language (here SL-Hebrew) and Age of Onset of Bilingualism (AOB). Ninety-seven adult participants were recruited in four groups: three groups of Russian-Hebrew bilinguals with various AOBs of SL-Hebrew – before the age of 5 (n = 32), between the ages of 5–13 (n = 20), after the age of 13 (n = 19) – and a control group of monolingual Russian speakers (n = 26). The study elicited 20 requests in formal and informal contexts through oral role-plays. The results indicate that heritage speakers acquire the basics of prototypical Russian request strategies across various social contexts. The results also show effects of CLI and AOB in the pragmatic competence of HL-speakers. When faced with linguistic difficulties to express requests, HL speakers resort to the use of compensatory strategies leading to the creation of novel structures. These novel structures are a combination of conventions that are characteristic of the Russian acquired in childhood and transfer from the dominant SL. The study makes an important contribution to the understanding of HL pragmatic development by investigating the effects of CLI and AOB.
-
-
-
The acquisition of consonant clusters and word stress by early second language learners of German
Author(s): Angela Grimm and Ulrike DomahsAvailable online: 11 December 2023More LessAbstractThis study compared word-prosodic abilities of early second language learners (eL2) and monolingual learners of German. We examined the production of word-initial and word-final clusters and the placement of stress and analyzed potential effects of cross-linguistic influence (CLI). Monolingual German-speaking children (n = 38) and eL2-learners of German (n = 26; age of onset to German 24 to 41 months) aged between 53 and 60 months completed a pseudoword repetition task following the metrical and phonotactic constraints of German. We collected background information via parental questionnaires. The eL2-learners acquired 12 different L1s. To explore the effects of CLI, we grouped the heritage languages by the number of consonants permitted in word-initial and word-final position, the segmental make-up of clusters, and stress patterns. The production accuracy of word-initial clusters and word stress was very high, indicating a high degree of maturation and showing no effects of CLI. In contrast, the production accuracy of word-final clusters was lower and effects of CLI were found, presumably related to smaller sonority distances compared to word-initial clusters. The study contributes empirically to the under-investigated area of eL2 word-prosodic development.
-
-
-
Prediction during spoken language processing in monolingual and multilingual children
Author(s): Jasmijn E. Bosch and Francesca FoppoloAvailable online: 11 December 2023More LessAbstractListeners use linguistic cues to anticipate upcoming words, but not all do so to the same extent. While we know that monolingual children use prediction during spoken language processing from a young age and that adult L2 speakers may sometimes be slower, very few studies have focused on bilingual or multilingual children. Moreover, previous research suggests that literacy boosts anticipation in spoken language processing, but this has not been tested yet in bi/multilinguals. We investigated linguistic prediction and its relation to reading and vocabulary skills in 38 eight- to twelve-year-old bilingual and multilingual children who speak different heritage languages and Italian as the majority language, in comparison to 32 age-matched monolingual Italian children. Using a visual world eye tracking method, we tested children’s ability to anticipate nouns based on morphosyntactic cues (gender- and number-marked articles) in Italian. The results show efficient prediction in both groups, although monolinguals were faster than bi/multilinguals. While we found a positive relation between predictive language processing and reading in monolingual children, there were no reliable effects in bilingual and multilingual children. Future work is required to better understand the relation between prediction and literacy in this population.
-
-
-
Inter-generational attrition
Author(s): Giuditta Smith, Roberta Spelorzi, Antonella Sorace and Maria GarraffaAvailable online: 14 November 2023More LessAbstractThe phenomenon of language change in contact has been explored most significantly in speakers of a language who migrate, while fewer studies explore how language is affected across different generations. In this study, we aimed to investigate the role of inter-generational attrition on the production of clitic pronouns and clitic clusters. 86 adult speakers of Italian took part in the study: homeland residents, long-term UK residents, and heritage speakers born and living in the UK from Italian families. Participants were tested on the production of different instances of clitic pronouns including clusters, a novelty of the study, and differences in response distribution were analysed with General Additive Models. Results reveal that the homeland population shows a strong preference for the production of clitics and clitic clusters, long-term residents retain a preference for clitics but not clusters, and heritage speakers disfavour the use of both clitics and clusters across the board, preferring the use of lexical items. This neat pattern of use across generations of migrants suggests a loss of the specificity and preference of clitics through language transmission between different generations of speakers of Italian removed from the homeland and immersed in a non-clitic language.
-
-
-
How cross–linguistic influence affects the use of duration in the production and perception of corrective and non–corrective focus types
Author(s): Farhat Jabeen and Bettina BraunAvailable online: 20 October 2023More LessAbstractSpeakers use corrective focus as an explicit way to correct misunderstandings in communication. We investigate whether immersive contact with a rhythmically different language affects the production and perception of duration as a cue to corrective and non–corrective focus. We tested twenty-eight native speakers and sixty-four native listeners of Urdu, half of whom lived in Germany and used German as a second language, and half lived in Pakistan. German is a stress–timed language with head–prominence marking and makes intensive use of duration to mark corrective focus, while Urdu is a syllable–timed language with edge–prominence marking, which uses duration differently from German to mark focus types. Results showed that the majority language, German, affected focus processing in Urdu differently across modalities: In production, focus marking was not affected by country of residence, while in perception, Urdu speakers living in Germany were more sensitive to duration in the corrective focus context than Urdu speakers in Pakistan. We analyze this as cross–linguistic influence and argue that contact with a stress–timed, head–prominence majority language (here: German) affects the cue weighting in the native language Urdu in perception but not (yet) in production.
-
-
-
Cognate facilitation in single- and dual-language contexts in bilingual children’s word processing
Author(s): Elly Koutamanis, Gerrit Jan Kootstra, Ton Dijkstra and Sharon UnsworthAvailable online: 20 October 2023More LessAbstractWe examined the extent to which cognate facilitation effects occurred in simultaneous bilingual children’s production and comprehension and how these were modulated by language dominance and language context. Bilingual Dutch-German children, ranging from Dutch-dominant to German-dominant, performed picture naming and auditory lexical decision tasks in single-language and dual-language contexts. Language context was manipulated with respect to the language of communication (with the experimenter and in instructional videos) and by means of proficiency tasks. Cognate facilitation effects emerged in both production and comprehension and interacted with both dominance and context. In a single-language context, stronger cognate facilitation effects were found for picture naming in children’s less dominant language, in line with previous studies on individual differences in lexical activation. In the dual-language context, this pattern was reversed, suggesting inhibition of the dominant language at the decision level. Similar effects were observed in lexical decision. These findings provide evidence for an integrated bilingual lexicon in simultaneous bilingual children and shed more light on the complex interplay between lexicon-internal and lexicon-external factors modulating the extent of lexical cross-linguistic influence more generally.
-
-
-
Lexical and morphosyntactic variation in Persian heritage language outcomes
Author(s): Khadij Gharibi, Fatih Bayram and Gustavo GuajardoAvailable online: 10 October 2023More LessAbstractIndividual variation in heritage language (HL) outcomes does not seem to be random. Instead, this variation can be related to the specific exposure and use patterns heritage speakers (HSs) have with their languages in the contexts they reside. In this study, we present data from 38 child HSs of Persian in English dominant contexts (in New Zealand and the UK), their mothers as well as a control group of age-matched monolinguals in Iran. All participants completed a film-retelling task from which their lexical sophistication (LS) and clausal density (CD) were measured. In addition, the HSs’ mothers completed a sociolinguistic questionnaire for their children which was used to calculate proxies for language experiences. Out of the two linguistic measures, the HSs differed from monolinguals only in LS scores. Regarding the relationship between HSs’ linguistic scores and language experiences, Random Forest analyses showed HL literacy to be the most important variable for the CD scores; while it was the HSs’ age-at-testing for LS. The mothers’ scores were only important for the HSs’ LS scores. This study contributes to the ongoing discussions on the nature of HL development, outcomes and individual variation.
-
-
-
Shared syntax and cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children
Author(s): Sharon UnsworthAvailable online: 10 October 2023More LessAbstractThis paper investigates the role of structural priming in cross-linguistic influence, a well-established yet poorly understood characteristic of bilingual language development. More specifically, we test the proposal that cross-linguistic influence may be conceptualized as between-language priming, that is, as the result of prior linguistic exposure ( Serratrice, 2016 ) and shared syntactic representations between languages ( Hartsuiker et al., 2004 ). In Experiment 1, we primed bilingual English-Dutch children between languages using possessive structures (e.g., the astronaut’s dog, the dog of the astronaut). In Experiment 2, we compared the same group of children with bilingual Spanish-Dutch and monolingual Dutch children using within-language priming. Within-language priming was stronger than between-language priming. In both experiments, we examined the relation between priming behaviour and individual differences in language exposure, use and proficiency. Experiment 1 found between-language priming with long-lasting effects modulated by proficiency. The results of Experiment 2 were consistent with inverse priming effects in within-language priming modulated – to a degree – by properties of the bilingual children’s other language. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the proposal that between-language priming is a plausible mechanism underpinning cross-linguistic influence and that bilingual children develop shared syntactic representations for structures which are similar across their two languages.
-
-
-
What looks native-like may not necessarily be native-like
Author(s): Lilong Xu and Boping YuanAvailable online: 14 September 2023More LessAbstractA substantial body of research has investigated null arguments in L2 Chinese, showing that they can be native-like. However, recent linguistic research has demonstrated convincingly that some ‘missing’ arguments in Chinese should be viewed not as ‘null’ arguments but as a result of movement and ellipsis. These advances necessitate a revaluation of the issue of ‘null’ arguments in previous L2 studies which largely overlooked the role of ellipsis in accounting for missing arguments in L2 Chinese. To fill the lacuna, this study recognises the above recent advances and examines whether missing objects in English speakers’ L2 Chinese parallel sentences are a result of verb raising and VP ellipsis and are genuinely native-like. Results of a picture-description task and an acceptability judgement task suggest that although L2ers, like native Chinese speakers, can accept and produce missing objects in Chinese, their native-like performance is driven by mechanisms different from those of native Chinese speakers (i.e., the missing objects are erroneously used as null objects in L2 Chinese). The findings advance our understanding of L1 vs. L2 different mechanisms for phonetically unrealised objects in Chinese, suggesting that what looks native-like in L2 may not necessarily be native-like.
-
-
-
Heritage speakers’ processing of the Spanish subjunctive
Author(s): Priscila López-Beltrán and Paola E. DussiasAvailable online: 28 August 2023More LessAbstractWe investigated linguistic knowledge of subjunctive mood in heritage speakers of Spanish who live in a long-standing English-Spanish bilingual community in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Three experiments examine the constraints on subjunctive selection. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 employed pupillometry to investigate heritage speakers’ online sensitivity to the presence of the subjunctive with non-variable governors (Lexical conditioning) and with negated governors (Structural conditioning). Experiment 3 employed an elicited production task to examine production of subjunctive in the same contexts. The findings of the heritage group were compared to those of a group of Spanish-dominant Mexican bilinguals. Results showed that in comprehension and production, heritage speakers were as sensitive as the Spanish-dominant bilinguals to the lexical and structural factors that condition mood selection. In comprehension, the two groups experienced an increased pupillary dilation in conditions where the indicative was used but the subjunctive was expected. In addition, high-frequency governors and irregular subordinate verbs boosted participants’ sensitivity to the presence of the subjunctive. In production, there were no significant differences between heritage speakers and Spanish-dominant bilinguals when producing the subjunctive with non-variable and negated governors.
-
-
-
Second language learners acquire reduced word forms just like they acquire full forms
Author(s): Lisa Morano, Louis ten Bosch and Mirjam ErnestusAvailable online: 29 June 2023More LessAbstractWe investigated the effect of auditory exposure on the recognition of full (i.e., canonical) and reduced (i.e., with weakened or deleted sounds) word forms by beginner second language (L2) learners. We taught three participant groups the same French schwa words. One group was trained only on the full (i.e., with schwa) forms, one group on the reduced forms (i.e., without schwa) only, and one group on both the full and reduced forms of each word. We then tested participants’ recognition of both forms in an auditory lexical decision task. We found that participants’ accuracy for a form was proportional to the exposure they received at training for that form. Both participants’ groups trained on one form recognized the untrained form in about a third of the trials. We conclude that exposure is a crucial factor in learning L2 reduced forms and that listeners use both retrieval from storage and goodness of fit (including reconstruction) mechanisms, in the same way for full as for reduced forms.
-
-
-
Foreign accent in L1 (first language)
Author(s): Jeong-Im Han, Joo-Yeon Kim and Kimiko TsukadaAvailable online: 09 June 2023More LessAbstractThis study builds on Flege et al. (2006) and evaluated the influence of chronological age and length of residence in North America on degree of foreign accent in first language (L1) Korean by Korean adults and children in immigrant settings. The adult (A4/6) and child (C4/6) immigrants lived in the host countries for 4 or 6 years, respectively. Their Korean utterances were compared to those of age-matched controls in Seoul, Korea. The purpose was to examine the cross-linguistic influence of English on the degree of foreign accent in L1 Korean by the immigrants. Eighteen native-speaking judges rated four Korean utterances for overall degree of perceived foreign accent. Both adult and child immigrants were more strongly foreign accented than the controls. However, (1) stability of L1 Korean was greater (less foreign-accented) for the adult than child immigrants; and (2) there was no significant difference between the A4 and A6, and C4 and C6 groups. This suggests that by the time the Korean immigrants lived in North America for four years, they have diverged audibly from the predominantly monolingual speakers in Seoul. The results have implications for L1 maintenance/attrition and plasticity in spoken language processing.
-
-
-
Telicity judgments in L2 English by L1 Slovak speakers
Author(s): Zuzana Nadova and María del Pilar García MayoAvailable online: 02 June 2023More LessAbstractThe study investigates the acquisition of telicity in L2 English by L1 Slovak speakers as a function of L2 proficiency (measured by a cloze test score), exposure (operationalized as length of stay in an English-speaking country) and instruction type (monolingual vs. bilingual). Telicity judgments were collected from Slovak learners of L2 English (n = 50) and a control group of American English native speakers (n = 15) in two offline acceptability judgment tasks. Two types of telicity encoding were examined: (1) the contribution of the [±quantized] feature of the object argument to predicate telicity, which involves processes in narrow syntax; and (2) the contribution of adverbial modifiers to telicity interpretations, including coercion contexts, which involve processes of aspectual reinterpretation. Based on previous research, it was hypothesized that the contribution of the [±quantized] feature of the object argument to predicate telicity, which is a syntactic phenomenon, will be easier to acquire than aspectual coercion by means of adverbial modifiers, which relies on pragmatic cues. The results indicate that the most significant predictor of telicity judgments based on syntactic cues is L2 proficiency, while length of stay affects telicity judgments in predicate categories involving coercion contexts.
-
-
-
Prosodic interaction in Cantonese-English bilingual children’s speech production
Author(s): Jonathan Him Nok Lee, Regine Yee King Lai, Stephen Matthews and Virginia YipAvailable online: 11 April 2023More Less
-
-
-
Mixing adjectives
Author(s): Rena Torres Cacoullos and Jessica Vélez AvilésAvailable online: 13 March 2023More LessAbstractHow do bilinguals mix adjectives and nouns from two languages with a word order conflict at the boundary between them? Prominently competing theories of code-switching (CS) that appeal to abstract features or to a matrix language remain in a stalemate, since their predictions have been reported to mostly coincide. Here, we contribute data from northern New Mexico bilingual community members who switch between Spanish and English in both directions. Beyond the NP-internal mixes within the purview of the theories, the widened data set encompasses all relevant mixes and positions: every adjective or associated noun at the boundary with the other language. We thus assess lone-item and multi-word mixing types, distinguishing also between multi-word CS at different points of the NP. Multi-word CS at the adjective-noun boundary is indeed rare. These bilinguals choose CS after the determiner with prenominal modifiers in English adjective-noun pairs, as previously observed, and at the external NP boundary. Furthermore, they disproportionately prefer the shared predicative position. Accounting for all adjective mixes, the Variable Equivalence hypothesis proposes that, where cross-language equivalence is not consistent due to language-internal variability, bilinguals prefer CS at alternative syntactic boundaries that are consistently equivalent and more frequent in their combined linguistic experience.
-
-
-
Frequency effects and aspect morphology with state verbs in heritage Spanish
Author(s): Patrick D. ThaneAvailable online: 08 March 2023More LessAbstractA total of 54 HS and 17 Spanish-dominant participants completed an elicited production task (EPT) and a forced choice task (FCT) to explore how proficiency, frequency of use, age of acquisition of English, morphological regularity, and lexical frequency affected their production and selection of preterit morphology with states. Results showed that HS’ production of preterit with states was negatively correlated with lexical frequency, such that these bilinguals were more likely to use the preterit with less-frequent verbs. Higher-proficiency speakers were less susceptible to the effects of lexical frequency in production. In contrast, proficiency modulated HS’ responses in the FCT. HS were more likely to select the preterit in the FCT than to produce it in the EPT. Together, these results support theories of heritage language acquisition that emphasize the role of activation of linguistic features and asymmetries between production and comprehension.
-