Article published in:
Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children
Edited by Maialen Iraola Azpiroz, Shanley E.M. Allen, Kalliopi Katsika and Leigh Fernandez
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4/5] 2019
► pp. 514–541

Processing strategies used by Basque-French bilingual and Basque monolingual children for the production of the subject-agent in Basque

| Iker UMR 5478 (CNRS/Bordeaux3/UPPA)
| Octogone-Lordat EA 4156, University of Toulouse

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.

Keywords: sentence production strategies, early bilingual children, ergative case
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Competition Model: A model for language comprehension and production
    • 2.1Cue validity
    • 2.2Cue cost
    • 2.3Application of the Competition Model to language production
  • 3.Ergative case marking in Basque and its acquisition
  • 4.The study
  • 5.Method
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Task and procedure
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Data from Session 1
    • 6.2Data from Session 2
    • 6.3Data from Session 3
    • 6.4Summary of the results
  • 7.Discussion
    • 7.1Local strategy (ergative noun marking) versus topological strategy (word order)
    • 7.2One local strategy (ergative noun marking) versus another local strategy (ergative verb marking)
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 09 October 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.16047.dug
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