This study investigated the use of demonstratives in encoding already mentioned referents in two generations of Mandarin Chinese speakers in the Netherlands. Data from twelve families was compared to baseline data from eight native controls in China. Previous literature suggests that languages without dedicated morphology to encode definiteness might develop such morphemes in contact with a language with articles (cf. Backus, Doğruöz, & Heine, 2011). Demonstrative pronouns may be reinterpreted as articles and this process could result in an increase in demonstrative use. We accordingly expected to find such an increase in Mandarin Chinese spoken in the Netherlands and found confirmation for this in both generations of speakers. A preference for the distal demonstrative was observed only in the second generation.
One of the mechanisms responsible for the fast recognition of spoken language is prediction. This study examined whether 4–5 year old monolingual children differ from bilingual children in predicting the upcoming noun on the basis of the lexical semantics of the verb. In an eye-tracking task, we presented visual displays with two objects (e.g. cake, tree) while presenting semantically constraining (e.g. The boy eats the big cake) or neutral sentences (e.g. The boy sees the big cake). Results showed that both groups are able to predict but that 4-year-old bilinguals are faster than their monolingual peers. Moreover, sentence prediction ability in bilinguals is associated with performance on the forward digit recall task. These results extend views on bilingual sentence processing.
We propose a new paradigm for testing the influence of specificity on the acquisition of English articles (Ionin, 2003; Ionin et al., 2004; Ionin et al., 2009; Ko et al., 2010). We discuss and resolve issues of validation and present a preview and discussion of the results the new paradigm generates for L2 learners of English with Mandarin as an L1.
The paper reports on a cross-linguistic study on speech data produced by monolingual and bilingual Dutch and Danish teenagers. The prediction that both monolingual and bilingual Danish youngsters show less variation in grammatical gender due to more morphological input cues for gender in Danish than in Dutch is borne out. More precise results of this cross-linguistic study are that free morphemes may vary in teenagers’ actual language use in Danish whereas bound morphemes may not. Further, the teenagers produce far more common than neuter nouns in both languages and the bilinguals overuse common gender of the definite determiner in Dutch and, though demonstrably less, the indefinite determiner in Danish.
We study dialectal influence and gender marking in 25 bilectal children and 11 adults speaking Italian and Venetan, based on an elicited production task (EPT) in each of the two varieties. The children are between 5 and 11 years old and vary with respect to their reported use of the dialect at home. The results of the EPT show that the children produce only Italian DPs in the Italian experiment, while producing Italian, Venetan and mixed DPs in the Venetan experiment. However, regardless of the amount of dialect use, children follow the gender assignment rules of Italian and Venetan in both monolingual and mixed DPs.
Cross-linguistic influence of interface-conditioned properties in bilingual language acquisition has been reported in a large number of studies and various linguistic domains. While many of these studies have found that cross-linguistic influence can occur in the form of delay, few have shown evidence for acceleration (a.o., Kupisch, 2007; Meisel, 2007; Schwartz, Nir, Leikin, Levie, & Ravid, 2014). In this paper we investigate the interpretation of indefinites in sentences containing negation by simultaneous bilingual (2L1) English-Dutch and Italian-Dutch children. Our results provide evidence for cross-linguistic influence from Italian to Dutch in the form of acceleration, only. We conclude that in cases of partial overlap between a bilingual child’s two languages, the direction of cross-linguistic influence can also depend on language-internal properties.
We examine the acquisition of progressivity in the German simple present tense (GPT) and related constructions by English natives of L2 German, under the guise of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis. German lacks an explicit gerundial form; the AM + infinitive (am) and BEIM + infinitive (beim) constructions express progressivity, along with the GPT. Although semantically the am and beim constructions map to the English copula + gerund, their unique syntax creates grammaticality differences. We employ three experiments testing (1) the acquisition of the aspectual properties of the GPT, and knowledge of the (2) semantic distribution of, and (3) syntax of am and beim. Data from a control group (n = 25) and adult L2s (n = 20) suggest adult L2 feature reassembly is possible, albeit complicated.
Assuming that production places a greater burden on processing than comprehension, this study explores the hypothesis that both the degree of linguistic computational complexity entailed in a particular structure and the processing capacity of the speakers determine if and when production/comprehension asymmetries will surface. Elicited production and comprehension of French wh-questions were studied in 29 English-speaking children acquiring French as a second language (L2) and 27 French-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment, aged 6 to 12. Results confirm the hypothesis and underline the fundamental role of complexity in language acquisition, pointing to implications for the effects of first language transfer, age of onset and length of exposure in L2 acquisition, and on differences between children with and without language pathology.
We investigated whether (1) 7–9-year-old children with SLI, bilingual children (BIL) and monolingual (TD) children differed on Dutch past tense production of real and pseudo-verbs and (2) whether non-word repetition (NWR), receptive vocabulary, and group status contributed to past tense production. Past tense patterned as SLI < BIL < TD, for NWR as SLI < BIL = TD and for vocabulary SLI = BIL < TD. Vocabulary and SLI group status were significant predictors of real-verb past tense inflection. SLI and bilingual group status were predictors of pseudo-verb past tense inflection. These findings confirm the association between vocabulary and past tense and the difficulty that children with SLI and bilingual children have with both skills.
Some languages base their article choice on specificity (Samoan), others on definiteness (English: a vs. the). As for L2 article acquisition, Ionin, Zubizaretta, and Maldonado (2008) argue that definiteness-based article choice in the L1 (Spanish) enhances article-acquisition in a definiteness-based L2 (English). However, Deprez, Sleeman, and Guella (2008) show that Dutch learners of L2-French (both definiteness-based) perform poorly on French article choice, suggesting reliance on specificity, and refuting positive L1 influence.
The current study is a pilot investigation into L2-English article choice in 104 native Dutch speakers. The results show definite and indefinite article overuse in the primary, but not in the elementary-intermediate-proficiency groups. We propose that lexical-semantic proficiency is a necessary condition for cross-linguistic influence to be visible.
Success or failure in L2 acquisition has been attributed to different factors, such as the linguistic domain involved, (the absence of) instruction or positive or negative transfer. Whereas in most of the literature these factors are studied separately, in this paper we investigate the relative impact of each of them, analyzing the L2 acquisition of the French quantitative pronoun en by native speakers of Dutch. On the basis of acquisition data elicited in a Grammaticality Judgment Task, we show that the L2 acquisition of en proceeds very slowly. We argue that this is mainly caused by the presence of a similar, but not completely equivalent pronoun in Dutch.
Our study investigates the use of articles and object clitics in the L2-Greek of child speakers of Russian with and without Specific Language Impairment. Effects of language impairment were examined in the narratives of children whose languages differ in the expression of definiteness: Russian lacks articles and allows null objects with specific reference, while Greek requires object clitics in the same context and has definite and indefinite articles. Language impairment led to more article and clitic omission in obligatory contexts, as well as more substitution errors in clitics. The bilingual children with SLI lagged behind TD bilingual Russian-Greek peers in both grammatical knowledge of functional categories related to the D system in Greek and access to discourse information influencing definiteness.
This study investigated the use of demonstratives in encoding already mentioned referents in two generations of Mandarin Chinese speakers in the Netherlands. Data from twelve families was compared to baseline data from eight native controls in China. Previous literature suggests that languages without dedicated morphology to encode definiteness might develop such morphemes in contact with a language with articles (cf. Backus, Doğruöz, & Heine, 2011). Demonstrative pronouns may be reinterpreted as articles and this process could result in an increase in demonstrative use. We accordingly expected to find such an increase in Mandarin Chinese spoken in the Netherlands and found confirmation for this in both generations of speakers. A preference for the distal demonstrative was observed only in the second generation.
One of the mechanisms responsible for the fast recognition of spoken language is prediction. This study examined whether 4–5 year old monolingual children differ from bilingual children in predicting the upcoming noun on the basis of the lexical semantics of the verb. In an eye-tracking task, we presented visual displays with two objects (e.g. cake, tree) while presenting semantically constraining (e.g. The boy eats the big cake) or neutral sentences (e.g. The boy sees the big cake). Results showed that both groups are able to predict but that 4-year-old bilinguals are faster than their monolingual peers. Moreover, sentence prediction ability in bilinguals is associated with performance on the forward digit recall task. These results extend views on bilingual sentence processing.
We propose a new paradigm for testing the influence of specificity on the acquisition of English articles (Ionin, 2003; Ionin et al., 2004; Ionin et al., 2009; Ko et al., 2010). We discuss and resolve issues of validation and present a preview and discussion of the results the new paradigm generates for L2 learners of English with Mandarin as an L1.
The paper reports on a cross-linguistic study on speech data produced by monolingual and bilingual Dutch and Danish teenagers. The prediction that both monolingual and bilingual Danish youngsters show less variation in grammatical gender due to more morphological input cues for gender in Danish than in Dutch is borne out. More precise results of this cross-linguistic study are that free morphemes may vary in teenagers’ actual language use in Danish whereas bound morphemes may not. Further, the teenagers produce far more common than neuter nouns in both languages and the bilinguals overuse common gender of the definite determiner in Dutch and, though demonstrably less, the indefinite determiner in Danish.
We study dialectal influence and gender marking in 25 bilectal children and 11 adults speaking Italian and Venetan, based on an elicited production task (EPT) in each of the two varieties. The children are between 5 and 11 years old and vary with respect to their reported use of the dialect at home. The results of the EPT show that the children produce only Italian DPs in the Italian experiment, while producing Italian, Venetan and mixed DPs in the Venetan experiment. However, regardless of the amount of dialect use, children follow the gender assignment rules of Italian and Venetan in both monolingual and mixed DPs.
Cross-linguistic influence of interface-conditioned properties in bilingual language acquisition has been reported in a large number of studies and various linguistic domains. While many of these studies have found that cross-linguistic influence can occur in the form of delay, few have shown evidence for acceleration (a.o., Kupisch, 2007; Meisel, 2007; Schwartz, Nir, Leikin, Levie, & Ravid, 2014). In this paper we investigate the interpretation of indefinites in sentences containing negation by simultaneous bilingual (2L1) English-Dutch and Italian-Dutch children. Our results provide evidence for cross-linguistic influence from Italian to Dutch in the form of acceleration, only. We conclude that in cases of partial overlap between a bilingual child’s two languages, the direction of cross-linguistic influence can also depend on language-internal properties.
We examine the acquisition of progressivity in the German simple present tense (GPT) and related constructions by English natives of L2 German, under the guise of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis. German lacks an explicit gerundial form; the AM + infinitive (am) and BEIM + infinitive (beim) constructions express progressivity, along with the GPT. Although semantically the am and beim constructions map to the English copula + gerund, their unique syntax creates grammaticality differences. We employ three experiments testing (1) the acquisition of the aspectual properties of the GPT, and knowledge of the (2) semantic distribution of, and (3) syntax of am and beim. Data from a control group (n = 25) and adult L2s (n = 20) suggest adult L2 feature reassembly is possible, albeit complicated.
Assuming that production places a greater burden on processing than comprehension, this study explores the hypothesis that both the degree of linguistic computational complexity entailed in a particular structure and the processing capacity of the speakers determine if and when production/comprehension asymmetries will surface. Elicited production and comprehension of French wh-questions were studied in 29 English-speaking children acquiring French as a second language (L2) and 27 French-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment, aged 6 to 12. Results confirm the hypothesis and underline the fundamental role of complexity in language acquisition, pointing to implications for the effects of first language transfer, age of onset and length of exposure in L2 acquisition, and on differences between children with and without language pathology.
We investigated whether (1) 7–9-year-old children with SLI, bilingual children (BIL) and monolingual (TD) children differed on Dutch past tense production of real and pseudo-verbs and (2) whether non-word repetition (NWR), receptive vocabulary, and group status contributed to past tense production. Past tense patterned as SLI < BIL < TD, for NWR as SLI < BIL = TD and for vocabulary SLI = BIL < TD. Vocabulary and SLI group status were significant predictors of real-verb past tense inflection. SLI and bilingual group status were predictors of pseudo-verb past tense inflection. These findings confirm the association between vocabulary and past tense and the difficulty that children with SLI and bilingual children have with both skills.
Some languages base their article choice on specificity (Samoan), others on definiteness (English: a vs. the). As for L2 article acquisition, Ionin, Zubizaretta, and Maldonado (2008) argue that definiteness-based article choice in the L1 (Spanish) enhances article-acquisition in a definiteness-based L2 (English). However, Deprez, Sleeman, and Guella (2008) show that Dutch learners of L2-French (both definiteness-based) perform poorly on French article choice, suggesting reliance on specificity, and refuting positive L1 influence.
The current study is a pilot investigation into L2-English article choice in 104 native Dutch speakers. The results show definite and indefinite article overuse in the primary, but not in the elementary-intermediate-proficiency groups. We propose that lexical-semantic proficiency is a necessary condition for cross-linguistic influence to be visible.
Success or failure in L2 acquisition has been attributed to different factors, such as the linguistic domain involved, (the absence of) instruction or positive or negative transfer. Whereas in most of the literature these factors are studied separately, in this paper we investigate the relative impact of each of them, analyzing the L2 acquisition of the French quantitative pronoun en by native speakers of Dutch. On the basis of acquisition data elicited in a Grammaticality Judgment Task, we show that the L2 acquisition of en proceeds very slowly. We argue that this is mainly caused by the presence of a similar, but not completely equivalent pronoun in Dutch.
Our study investigates the use of articles and object clitics in the L2-Greek of child speakers of Russian with and without Specific Language Impairment. Effects of language impairment were examined in the narratives of children whose languages differ in the expression of definiteness: Russian lacks articles and allows null objects with specific reference, while Greek requires object clitics in the same context and has definite and indefinite articles. Language impairment led to more article and clitic omission in obligatory contexts, as well as more substitution errors in clitics. The bilingual children with SLI lagged behind TD bilingual Russian-Greek peers in both grammatical knowledge of functional categories related to the D system in Greek and access to discourse information influencing definiteness.