Chapter published in:
Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research: Selected papers from the 7th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Edited by Tania Ionin and Matthew Rispoli
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 63] 2019
► pp. 225–251

The acquisition of Mandarin reflexives by heritage speakers and second language learners

| University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
This study investigates (a) whether heritage speakers (HSs) and second language learners (L2ers) acquire the properties of Mandarin reflexives and (b) whether HSs have an advantage over L2ers in acquiring the binding properties of Mandarin reflexives: taziji ‘himself/herself’, which requires local antecedents, and ziji ‘self’, which allows local and long-distance (LD) antecedents. Fourteen native speakers (NSs), 14 HSs, and 12 L2ers completed a Truth Value Judgment Task. Unlike NSs, HSs and L2ers predominantly allowed local but not LD interpretations, possibly due to English transfer and/or local binding as the default option. Regarding taziji, HSs patterned with NSs in accepting only local interpretations, while L2ers overaccepted the LD interpretations and underaccepted the local interpretations, possibly due to indeterminacy in judgments or misanalysis of taziji as the pronoun ta.
Keywords: Mandarin, reflexives, heritage language acquisition, second language acquisition
Published online: 15 April 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.12che
Reference

Reference

Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S.
(2015) Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1). CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chen, D.
(1995) Mandarin reflexive ziji in second language acquisition. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 2(2), 37–52.Google Scholar
Chen, Z., Jäger, L., & Vasishth, S.
(2012) How structure-sensitive is the parser? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese. In B. Stolterfoht & S. Featherston (Eds.), Empirical approaches to linguistic theory: Studies of meaning and structure (pp.43–62). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Chien, Y. C., Wexler, K., & Chang, H. W.
(1993) Children’s development of long-distance binding in Mandarin. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 2(3), 229–259. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chien, Y. C., & Lust, B. C.
(2006) Mandarin children’s knowledge of the Binding Principles. In P. Li, L. H. Tan, E. Bates, & O. J. L Tzeng (Eds.), The handbook of east Asian psycholinguistics (pp.23–38). Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N.
(1981) Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Christie, K., & Lantolf, J.
(1998) Bind me up bind me down: Reflexives in L2. In S. Flynn, G. Martohardjono, & W. O’Neil (Eds.), The generative study of second language acquisition (pp.239–260). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Cole, P., Hermon, G., & Sung, L. M.
(1990) Principles and parameters of long-distance reflexives. Linguistic inquiry, 21(1), 1–22.Google Scholar
Cole, P., Hermon, G., & Huang, C -T. J.
(2006) Long-Distance binding in Asian languages. In M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to syntax (pp.21–84). Oxford: Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dillon, B.
(2014) Syntactic memory in the comprehension of reflexive dependencies: An overview. Language and Linguistics Compass, 8(5), 171–187. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dillon, B., Chow, W. Y., Wagers, M., Guo, T., Liu, F., & Phillips, C.
(2014) The structure-sensitivity of memory access: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1025. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dillon, B., Chow, W. Y., & Xiang, M.
(2016) The relationship between anaphor features and antecedent retrieval: Comparing Mandarin ziji and ta-ziji. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1966. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dugarova, E.
(2007) Acquisition of the Chinese reflexive ‘ziji’ by Russian and English speakers. In N. Hilton, R. Arscott, K. Barden, A. Krishna, S. Shah, & M. Zellers (Eds.), Proceedings of CamLing 2007 (pp.48–55). Cambridge: Cambridge Institute of Language ResearchGoogle Scholar
Eubank, L.
(1993/1994) On the transfer of parametric values in L2 development. Language Acquisition, 3(3), 183–208. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gürel, A.
(2002) Linguistic characteristics of second language acquisition and first language attrition: Turkish overt versus null pronouns (Unpublished PhD dissertation). McGill University.Google Scholar
Gürel, A. & Yilmaz, G.
(2011) Restructuring in the L1 Turkish grammar: Effects of L2 English and L2 Dutch. Language, Interaction and Acquisition, 2(2), 221–250.Google Scholar
He, X., & Kaiser, E.
(2016) Processing the Chinese reflexive “ziji”: Effects of Featural constraints on anaphor resolution. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 284.Google Scholar
Huang, C -T. J., & Liu, C -S. L.
(2001) Logophoricity, attitudes, and ziji at the interface. In P. Cole, G. Hermon, & C -T. J. Huang (Eds.), Long-distance reflexives (pp.141–195). New York, NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Huang, C -T. J., & Tang, C -C. J.
(1991) The local nature of the long-distance reflexive in Chinese. In J. Koster & E. Reuland (Eds.), Long-distance anaphora (pp.263–282). Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Huang, Y. -H.
(1984) Reflexives in Chinese. Studies in English Literature and Linguistics, 10, 163–188.Google Scholar
Ivanova-Sullivan, T.
(2014) Theoretical and experimental aspects of syntax-discourse interface in heritage grammars. Leiden: Brill. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jäger, L. A., Engelmann, F., & Vasishth, S.
(2015) Retrieval interference in reflexive processing: Experimental evidence from Mandarin, and computational modeling. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 617.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. F.
(2008) Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(4), 434–446. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kim, J. -H.
(2007) Binding interpretations in adult bilingualism: A study of language transfer in L2 learners and heritage speakers of Korean (Unpublished PhD dissertation). University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar
Kim, J. -H. ., Montrul, S., & Yoon, J.
(2009) Binding interpretations of anaphors by Korean heritage speakers. Language Acquisition, 16(1), 3–35. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kim, J. -H., Montrul, S., & Yoon, J.
(2010) Dominant language influence in acquisition and attrition of binding: Interpretation of the Korean reflexive caki . Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13(1), 73–84. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lardiere, D.
(2009) Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 25(2), 173–227. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lenth, R. V.
(2016) Least-squares means: The R Package lsmeans. Journal of Statistical Software, 69(1), 1–33. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Li, X., & Zhou, X.
(2010) Who is ziji? ERP responses to the Mandarin reflexive pronoun during sentence comprehension. Brain research, 1331, 96–104. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lu, H. Y.
(2011) The effects of verb bias, context and tasks on mandarin Mandarin reflexives (Unpublished PhD dissertation). University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar
submitted). ‘Self in reality’–A corpus study of Mandarin reflexive ‘ziji’. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Manzini, R. M., & Wexler, K.
(1987) Parameters, Binding Theory, and learnability. Linguistic Inquiry, 18(3), 413–444.Google Scholar
Montrul, S.
(2008) Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism: Re-examining the age factor (Studies in Bilingualism 39). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S. A., Bhatt, R. M., & Bhatia, A.
(2012) Erosion of case and agreement in Hindi heritage speakers. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2(2), 141–176. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., & Ionin, T.
(2012) Dominant language transfer in Spanish heritage speakers and second language learners in the interpretation of definite articles. The Modern Language Journal, 96(1), 70–94. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
R. Core Team
(2017) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://​www​.R​-project​.org/ Google Scholar
Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A.
(1996) L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access model. Second Language Research, 12(1), 40–72. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Singmann, H., Bolker, B., Westfall, J., & Aust, F.
(2015) afex: Analysis of factorial experiments. R package version 0.13–145.Google Scholar
Sorace, A.
(2011) Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to bilingualism, 1(1), 1–33. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sperlich, D.
(2013) The acquisition of long-distance reflexives in Chinese as an interlanguage: An experimental study (Unpublished PhD dissertation). University of Auckland.Google Scholar
(2017) The instantiation of binding through pragmatic and syntactic processes. In I. Kecskés, & C. Sun (Eds.), Key issues in Chinese as a second language research (pp.188–213). London: Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
Steering Committee for the Test of Proficiency–Huayu
(2007) TOCFL Online Mock Tests–Reading. Retrieved from http://​www​.sc​-top​.org​.tw​/mocktest​_e​.php Google Scholar
Su, Y. C.
(2004) The development of long-distance binding for Mandarin ziji revisited. Chinese Journal of Psychology, 46(3), 249–257.Google Scholar
Tang, C. C. J.
(1989) Chinese reflexives. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 7(1), 93–121. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, M.
(1995) Acquisition of the Japanese reflexive zibun and movement of anaphors in Logical Form. Second Language Research, 11(3), 206–234. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tsimpli, I., & Sorace, A.
(2006) Differentiating interfaces: L2 performance in syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse phenomena. In D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia, & C. Zaller (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp.653–664). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Wexler, K., & Manzini, M. R.
(1987) Parameters and learnability in binding theory. In T. Poeper & E. Williams (Eds.), Parameter setting (pp.41–76). Dordrecht: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
White, L.
(1989) Universal Grammar and second language acquisition (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 1). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2003) Second language acquisition and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Yuan, B.
(1994) Long-distance and short-distance reflexives in second language acquisition. In C. S. Rhys, D. Adger, & A. von Klopp (Eds.), Functional categories, argument structure and parametric variation (pp.115–147). Edinburgh: EUP.Google Scholar
(1998) The interpretation of binding and orientation of the Mandarin reflexive ziji by English and Japanese speakers. Second Language Research, 14(4), 325–340. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zeng, L.
(2010) A cross language study of L2 acquisition of Chinese and English reflexives by English and Chinese speakers (Unpublished PhD dissertation). City University of Hong Kong.Google Scholar
Zhao, L. X.
(2014) Ultimate attainment of anaphora resolution in L2 Chinese. Second Language Research, 30(3), 381–407. CrossrefGoogle Scholar