Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Online First

Second language (L2) learners are known to have difficulty producing inflection in obligatory contexts reliably. According to the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH), the prosodic organisation of L2 inflection is constrained by the inventory of representations available in the L1. At the same time, this hypothesis does not explicitly limit how freely prosodic representations can be transferred, so that transfer across constructions within the same domain (e.g., verbal domain: L1 tense → L2 agreement) and across domains (e.g., verbal domain: L1 tense → nominal domain: L2 plurals) are both possible in principle. The goal of this study was to determine if the current formulation of the PTH is valid, or must be reined in to exclude transfer across domains in particular. Forty-four Korean learners of English did a spoken sentence-construction task in which they had to produce subject-verb agreement and regular plural inflection. Bayesian hierarchical regression was used to analyse the results. By examining asymmetries in the suppliance of short- vs. long-stemmed inflection, we show that there are no grounds for attaching any stipulations to the PTH along the above lines, as prosodic representations are transferrable not only across constructions but also across domains.

Recent research has identified language development in school-age heritage children as an important yet missing link between child early bilinguals and adult heritage speakers. This study investigates the Mandarin ba-construction ([(NP1)-ba-NP2-VP]) through elicited narration among heritage Mandarin children (n = 27, aged 4–14) and their parents (n = 18) in the UK. The results showed considerable similarities between the children and their parents in a number of key structural properties of the ba-construction. However, the children produced the ba-construction with reduced frequency and in a “heritage variety” with a reduced set of nominal and verbal phrases in NP2 and VP, which is not attested in a group of age-matched Mandarin speakers in Beijing. Additionally, higher frequency of the ba-construction in the heritage children’s production is associated with greater lexical diversity, rather than higher frequency of the ba-construction, in their parental input. We lay out positive aspects of the heritage variety of the ba-construction in sustaining the heritage language in bilingual contexts and consider the different roles of structural frequency and lexical diversity in parental input in maintaining the heritage grammar in late childhood and adolescence.