Acquisition of null objects in Mandarin Chinese by heritage speakers
Syntax-pragmatics interface knowledge without inflectional morphology
The acquisition of the grammatical knowledge related to inflectional morphology and syntax-pragmatics interface have both
been shown to be challenging for heritage speakers (e.g.,
Montrul et al. 2008;
Polinsky 2006,
2008;
Sorace et al. 2009;
Montrul 2009;
Benmamoun et al.
2013a;
Laleko & Polinsky 2016). In these previous work on heritage language
acquisition, the acquisition of inflectional morphology (e.g. either agreement morphology or topic marking) is also a relevant acquisition
task associated with the syntax-discourse phenomena under investigation. In this paper we focus on the acquisition of discourse-conditioned
structures by heritage speakers when inflectional morphology is not part of the learning task. Specifically, we report results of a
picture-verification experiment focusing on English-dominant heritage Chinese speakers’ grammatical knowledge of null objects. As a
topic-prominent language lacking verbal tense/agreement morphology, the licensing and identification of null arguments in Chinese has
nothing to do with agreement morphology. In addition, unlike other topic-prominent pro-drop languages, Chinese has no inflectional
morphology associated with grammatical subjects/objects and topic phrases. Without the interference of co-occurring inflectional morphology,
we found that there is no significant difference between heritage Chinese speakers and the monolingual baseline in their acceptance of null
objects in contextually appropriate contexts. The results of our study cast doubt on the thesis that heritage speakers are unable to acquire
discourse-related knowledge (cf.
Sorace & Serratrice 2009;
Laleko 2010;
Laleko & Polinsky 2016) and support
Yuan’s (2010) claim that interface categories should not be considered holistically.
Article outline
-
1.Introduction: Heritage bilingualism and vulnerable domains
- 2.Chinese null arguments
- 3.Methods
- 3.1Subjects
- 3.2Picture-verification task (PVT)
- 3.2.1Procedure
- 3.2.2Materials
- 3.2.3Results
- 3.2.4Discussion
- 4.General discussion
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Abbreviations
-
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Jin, Jing, Sihui Echo Ke & John Chi-Kin Lee
2022.
Language Interfaces in Adult Heritage Language Acquisition: A Study on Encoding of Nominal Reference in Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language.
Frontiers in Psychology 12
![DOI logo](//benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
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