Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Online First

This study examines French object clitic production in 20 typically developing L2 children (L1 English) compared to 19 monolingual children with SLI. We collected spontaneous and elicitation data twice at a one-year interval (T1, T2) in order to better evaluate the impact of age- and time-related factors on the L2-SLI comparison, as well as the impact of proficiency and working memory on object clitic production. The data revealed considerable group overlap at T1 in both tasks, but the L2 children produced significantly more object clitics than the SLI group at T2 in spontaneous language, thus suggesting that the L2-SLI overlap decreases when the L2 children have more language exposure. In elicitation, clitic production in both groups increased from T1 to T2 when all clitic types were included, but when only 3p accusative clitics were analyzed, the L2 children outperformed the SLI group. Age played an important role in elicitation in both groups, thus suggesting that mature performance systems, including unimpaired working memory, are required for object clitic production in this task. Language-related measures were linked to both tasks, thus suggesting that object clitic production is particularly sensitive to overall language proficiency, possibly because of issues with resource allocation.

Children who have knowledge of two languages may show better phonological awareness than their monolingual peers (e.g. Bruck & Genesee, 1995 ). It remains unclear how much bilingual experience is needed for such advantages to appear, and whether differences in language or cognitive skills alter the relation between bilingualism and phonological awareness. These questions were investigated in this cross-sectional study. Participants (n = 294; 4–7 year-olds, in the first three grades of primary school) were Dutch-speaking pupils attending mainstream monolingual Dutch primary schools or early-English schools providing English lessons from grade 1, and simultaneous Dutch-English bilinguals. We investigated phonological awareness (rhyming, phoneme blending, onset phoneme identification, and phoneme deletion) and its relation to age, Dutch vocabulary, English vocabulary, working memory and short-term memory, and the balance between Dutch and English vocabulary. Small significant (α < .05) effects of bilingualism were found on onset phoneme identification and phoneme deletion, but post-hoc comparisons revealed no robust pairwise differences between the groups. Furthermore, effects of bilingualism sometimes disappeared when differences in language or memory skills were taken into account. Learning two languages simultaneously is not beneficial to – and importantly, also not detrimental to – phonological awareness.

Bilinguals’ attitudes toward their languages can be a major source of linguistic variability. However, the effect of attitudes on crosslinguistic phonetic interactions in bilinguals remains largely unexplored. This study investigated the possibility of such effects in Cantonese-English bilinguals in Hong Kong (n = 26). Participants produced near-homophones in each language on separate days. Formant values of Cantonese [ɐ] and English [ʌ] and degrees of diphthongization of Cantonese [o] and [ai], and English [oʊ] and [ai], were analyzed as a function of language proficiency, use, and language attitude scores drawn from a background questionnaire. Participants’ attitudes toward Cantonese were predictive of the acoustic difference between similar Cantonese and Hong Kong English (HKE) vowels: More Cantonese-oriented speakers produced greater acoustic distance between crosslinguistically similar vowels. No effects of English attitudes, proficiency, or use were found. These results demonstrate that bilinguals’ attitude toward their native language can affect the degree of phonetic similarity between the two languages they speak.

This study examines five variables posited to drive(s) initial phonological transfer of (part of) one system over another in an L3: language status (L1/L2), facilitation, global structural similarity, dominance, and bilingual experience. Specifically, we investigate production of intervocalic voiced stops by English/Spanish bilinguals at the initial stages of L3 Brazilian Portuguese (BP) or Italian. These segments surface as [−continuant] in BP, Italian, and English but are realized as [+continuant] in Spanish; English transfer is therefore facilitative while Spanish is non-facilitative. Three groups (English-dominant heritage Spanish speakers, L1 English/L2 Spanish, L1 Spanish/L2 English) enrolled in first semester BP or Italian completed delayed repetition tasks in all three languages. The majority of participants across groups produce Spanish-like [+continuant] segments, suggestive of a primary role for global structural similarity. For the subset of participants across groups that produces English-like/L3-like [−continuant] segments, debrief data indicate a potential relationship between metalinguistic knowledge and [−continuant] production.

The present study describes the results of two experiments that analyze the effects of language dominance on Catalan/Spanish bilingual speech production. We examined the acoustics of the Catalan [a]~[ə] alternation (a phonological process induced by lexical stress) and of the Catalan mid vowel contrasts /e/-/ɛ/ and /o/-/ɔ/ (two phonemic contrasts) in the speech of Catalan- vs. Spanish-dominant early Catalan/Spanish bilinguals from Majorca (Spain). The results indicate that, contrary to the analysis of the Catalan mid vowels, stressed and unstressed Spanish and Catalan /a/ yielded no significant difference as a function of language dominance. These findings suggest that unstressed vowel reduction, a phonological process, may be relatively easier to acquire than phonemic contrasts with a low functional load (/e/-/ɛ/, /o/-/ɔ/), perhaps because its predictability and high frequency may attract attention and/or relieve cognitive resources, which could be conducive to phonological learning. These findings demonstrate that language dominance effects in the production of phonemic contrasts, widely researched in the literature on early bilingualism, do not guarantee the same effects on the implementation of phonological processes.

The main goal of this study is to investigate the nature of null elements used in German by early successive bilingual Polish-German children. The language pair offers the opportunity to investigate the possibility of cross-linguistic influence in the area of null arguments between two languages which differ significantly in the nature of the null arguments allowed in the grammars. Longitudinal data from four bilingual children who were first exposed to L2 German between the ages of 2;6 and 4;7 years is used in the investigation. The results show that early successive bilinguals have no underlying grammatical representation involving pro in their L2. Neither are the null elements exclusively a result of topic drop, as they are in German, or of discourse drop, as they are in adult Polish grammar. The findings suggest that early bilinguals transfer an L1 strategy of linking null elements to general pragmatic contexts.

We provide a snapshot of childhood morphology development in our investigation of two profiles of bilinguals (age 9–10) in an English-Spanish dual immersion academic setting: Spanish heritage language (SHL, n = 21) and second language (SL2, n = 41) children. Three tasks were given to the 62 bilinguals and 15 age-matched controls (Spanish first language, SL1): oral comprehension of 20 singular-plural present verbs, written sentence production of 10 similar verbs, and a meaning-focused writing task. SHL children were comparable to controls in production of number agreement, and showed no asymmetry between comprehension and production. SL2 learners showed lower accuracy than both SHL and SL1 children. A similar pattern was observed when person agreement and tense, aspect, mood and vowel errors were considered. The most common error among SHL and SL2 children was overregularization of stem vowels, a typical developmental error. The Feature Reassembly model of grammar can accommodate the range of possibilities represented by the data we present.

Bilingualism has been associated with age-related cognitive advantage. It is important to study cognitive control mechanisms to better understand this phenomenon. We sought to examine proactive and reactive control, as measured by fast and slow responses, respectively. The neural underpinnings of these modes of control were studied in rigorously matched elderly monolinguals and bilinguals, using fMRI performance on a Simon task. The results indicate that bilinguals performed efficiently in proactive mode, as more activation and connectivity were observed in the monolinguals. On the other hand, the monolinguals functioned more efficiently in reactive mode, recruiting fewer brain areas than the bilinguals. These results suggest that bilinguals’ function effortlessly and economically in proactive mode, which is preserved through lifelong use of languages, whereas monolinguals are efficient in reactive mode, which they use more often as a consequence of aging. Thus, frequent use in daily life contributes to efficient functioning in the respective mode of control.

This article introduces and defines the concept of mediated receptive multilingualism as a mode of multilingual communication which eases understanding between typologically distant languages through the medium of a language closely related to the target. In an experimental setting, Estonians without previous exposure to Ukrainian were quite successful in understanding Ukrainian texts via their knowledge of Russian. As expected, they made use of various language-specific elements to improve intelligibility, such as linguistic similarities between Russian and Ukrainian. However, a number of extra-linguistic factors were detected as influential predictors of success, especially metalinguistic awareness, exposure to Russian, exposure to various registers, experience with multilingual situations, learnability, and attitudes towards Ukrainian. These findings contest a static take on multilingual potential and point out the emergent nature of competencies and practices that become relevant in multilingual settings. Unconventional communicative modes – like mediated receptive multilingualism – may activate linguistic and sociolinguistic resources needed for establishing understanding in novel and potentially challenging communicative settings.

The article addresses the issue of an assumed correlation between heritage language speakers’ linguistic system and their fluency. Previous research has shown that heritage language speakers who have grammatical patterns that are divergent from the language spoken in the homeland also have lexical retrieval problems and speak with a slower speech rate. We approach the issue by examining two linguistic features and 11 different fluency features (‘structural’ and ‘performance features’) of 10 speakers of Argentine Heritage Danish. A factor analysis shows that the 11 performance features can be reduced to 2 factors that characterize the speakers ‘lexical retrieval’ and ‘fluency’. A correlation analysis with the two structural features, weakening of a phonological contrast between /oː/ and /ɔː/ and simplification of the gender system, shows that there are no correlations at all between these two measures of the speakers’ language production, in contrast to what previous research has found.