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The Acquisition and Processing of Spanish and Portuguese Morphosyntax: Theoretical and experimental issues
Edited by Rachel Klassen, Anahí Alba de la Fuente, Joanne Markle LaMontagne and Almudena Basanta y Romero-Valdespino
[Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 29:2] 2016
► pp. 429–461

Comparing anaphora resolution in early and late Brazilian Portuguese-European Portuguese bidialectal bilinguals

The present study examines anaphora resolution in two groups of speakers exposed to Brazilian and European Portuguese (BP and EP, respectively), considering the different null subject distribution in these languages. Our research question is whether late BP-EP bilinguals (age of EP onset: 29.1) and heritage BP speakers raised in Portugal (age of EP onset 5.6), tested in both dialects, will pattern like the native controls or display some effects of EP in their native BP or vice-versa. This is an interesting question in light of the Interface Hypothesis, which claims that external interfaces should be subject to general bilingualism effects irrespective of language pairing and age (Sorace, 2011). The results show that age has an effect, as the heritage speakers do not perform like the late learners, and that the high degree of typological proximity between the two languages could hinder bidialectal acquisition.

Keywords: bidialectalism, attrition, bilingualism, null subjects, Portuguese
Published online: 2 February 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.29.2.03cas
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