Cristina Flores

The effect of age on language attrition: Evidence from bilingual returnees

The present study investigates the syntactic competence of bilingual Portuguese–German returnees who have lost regular contact with their L2 (German). The main criterion which distinguishes the participants is the age of input loss. This allows their division into two main groups: speakers who lost German input during early childhood (between ages seven and ten) and speakers who were eleven or older when they moved away from the German environment. Focusing on verb placement in main and embedded clauses, the available data show strong evidence of the existence of a stabilization phase following the acquisition period. The speakers who lost L2 input earlier than age eleven show significantly more syntactic deficits than the other speakers. However, the observed attrition effects seem to be the result of insufficient L2 activation, rather than the expression of undergoing competence loss.

When reduced input leads to delayed acquisition: A study on the acquisition of clitic placement by Portuguese heritage speakers

This article examines the competence of heritage speakers of Portuguese living in Germany with respect to clitic placement in Portuguese by comparing their performance with that of monolingual speakers of the same age (7–15 years of age) in a test designed to elicit oral production data. The results of the study indicate that the heritage speakers go through stages in the acquisition of clitic placement that are similar to those of monolingual acquirers even though they take longer to attain the target grammar.

Differential effects of language attrition in the domains of verb placement and object expression

This study investigates the differential effects of language attrition in two diverse linguistic domains: verb placement and object expression. Linguistic phenomena at the syntax – discourse interface, such as object expression, have been shown to be more vulnerable to attrition than narrow syntax properties, such as verb placement. This study aims to test this hypothesis by analysing spoken data from Portuguese–German bilinguals who have moved away from the dominant German environment. The results show that the speakers who have lost continued German input after the age of eleven years exhibit difficulties regarding object expression in German but do not reveal any relevant syntactic deficits in the domain of verb placement.

Age and input effects in the acquisition of mood in Heritage Portuguese

The present study analyzes the effect of age and amount of input in the acquisition of European Portuguese as a heritage language. An elicited production task centred on mood choice in complement clauses was applied to a group of fifty bilingual children (six- to sixteen-year-olds) who are acquiring Portuguese as a minority language in a German dominant environment. The results show a significant effect of the age at testing and the amount of input in the acquisition of the subjunctive. In general, acquisition is delayed with respect to monolinguals, even though higher convergence with the monolingual grammar is observed after twelve years of age. Results also reveal that children with more exposure to the heritage language at home show faster acquisition than children from mixed households: the eight- to nine-year-old age boundary seems relevant for those speakers with more exposure, and the twelve- to thirteen-year-old age boundary for those with less exposure.

Losing a language in childhood: a longitudinal case study on language attrition

This paper is based upon a longitudinal study of L2 attrition in a bilingual child who grew up in an L2 migration background (Germany) and moved to the country of origin (Portugal) at the age of nine, experiencing a dominance shift from the L2 to the L1. The study aims to analyze the effects of language loss in L2 German. Data collection started 3 weeks after the childs immersion in the Portuguese setting and ended 18 months later. Results show first effects of language attrition after 5 months of reduced exposure to German; 18 months later the informant showed severe word retrieval difficulties and was unable to produce complete sentences in her L2. The findings thus confirm the conclusions of other studies on child language attrition, which attest to strong effects of attrition when the loss of contact with the target language occurs in childhood.

Null objects in the spontaneous speech of monolingual and bilingual speakers of European Portuguese

Abstract This paper investigates object omissions in the spontaneous production of European Portuguese by second-generation Portuguese-German bilingual speakers and compares them to first-generation migrants, and two age-matched groups of monolingual speakers. The results show that bilingual speakers as well as the younger generation of monolinguals show a higher number of null objects in their speech than the two older generations. This may reflect an inter-generational development that favours null objects, which is independent of language contact. The analysis of the syntactic and semantic conditions determining the occurrence of null objects in the speech of the different groups reveals that the semantic properties of the null objects realized by the bilinguals, particularly the higher rates of animate and non-propositional null objects, show that they extend the semantic-pragmatic conditions of null object realization along a referential hierarchy. The bilingual speakers may reflect a language-internal pathway that appears to resemble a diachronic change observed in BP.

On subject realization in infinitival complements of causative and perceptual verbs in European Portuguese: Evidence from monolingual and bilingual speakers

This study aims to investigate knowledge of a heritage language (HL), i.e. the language of origin of bilingual speakers who grow up in the context of migration with exposure to the HL and the dominant language of the host country. We focus on European Portuguese (EP), and concentrate on bi-clausal infinitival complements of causative and perception verbs. These may have different forms depending on whether the infinitival complement is inflected or uninflected. In particular, the subject may be Nominative or Accusative. Two experimental tasks were applied, a Completion Task and an Acceptability Judgment Task, to a total of 60 adult informants: 30 native speakers raised in a monolingual context, and 30 heritage speakers (HSs), raised in a bilingual context with EP as home language and German as environmental language. Overall both groups demonstrate an evident preference for Accusative over Nominative Case marked subjects, regardless of the presence of inflection on the infinitive. Concerning the monolingual group, the most striking result regards the residual rates of Nominative Case marked subjects in the presence of an inflected infinitive in both tasks. This result is unexpected under standard assumptions concerning clause structure in EP. We offer an alternative analysis based on the idea that preverbal Nominative Case marked subjects in EP are (typically) left-dislocated topics (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou l998; Barbosa 1995). Left-dislocated topics in EP are assigned Nominative Case by default. On this view, preference for avoiding a Nominative subject in the presence of an inflected infinitive reduces to preference for the operation of raising to object over the last resort operation of default (Nominative) Case assignment. This preference can be viewed as an instance of the Paninian principle Blocking, whereby a general, default form is blocked by the existence of a more specific rival form. In this case, the default Case option is blocked by the more specific operation of raising to object. The most significant difference between monolinguals and bilinguals concerns a higher rate of acceptance of Nominative pronouns by HSs, including in uninflected infinitives. This means that, on a par with the predominant raising to object option, the HSs allow Pilar Barbosa, Cristina Flores and Cátia Pereira, Universidade do Minho 126 Pilar Barbosa, Cristina Flores & Cátia Pereira for the default Case strategy; i.e., they fail to apply blocking. This strategy has also been attested in early stages of the acquisition of these constructions by EP monolingual children (Santos et al. 2016), a fact that reinforces the view that the process of acquisition of the HL is native-like in the sense that it goes through the same stages as the process of monolingual acquisition. However, by retaining an option that is no longer available in mature grammars, the HSs reveal protracted development.

Linguistic foundations of heritage language development from the perspective of romance languages in Germany

This paper discusses the role of different factors determining the linguistic competence of heritage speakers (HSs) based on examples from speakers who speak a Romance language (French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish) as heritage language (HL) and German as the environmental language. Since the relative amount of contact with the HL and the environmental language may vary during the acquisition process, the role of language dominance (in terms of relative language proficiency) is of particular

TEACHER EDUCATION CURRICULUM FOR TEACHING IMMIGRANT STUDENTS IN PORTUGUESE SCHOOLS

Educational systems of most European countries seem to be unable to respond adequately to the growing migration-induced multilingualism. None of the European member states has developed an integrated approach to address linguistic diversity in teacher education programmes that will respond to the demands of inclusion, equity, and social justice for all learners. This paper presents a European proposal for a second language teacher education curriculum and the process of its adaptation for the Portuguese context. This curriculum intends to prepare content teachers to work with immigrant pupils in mainstream classrooms with a focus on academic language. After the contextualization of the issue of social and linguistic needs of these immigrant students, the authors present a brief overview of the European project curriculum for Inclusive Academic Language Teaching, followed by a discussion of the Portuguese proposal and its implementation caveats. The authors propose a module on Portuguese as a Non-Native Language (PNN L), which covers the issues of second language acquisition in the schooling project, didactical issues of teaching and learning (inclusive) academic language, inclusive academic language and school organization issues. A national proposal for Portugal also embraces the concept of the teacher as a critical reflective practitioner and of school as a learning community. The authors conclude that this European proposal responds to pressing necessities in Portugal for the education of these students and constitutes a viable response to their language needs, in spite of the many constraints in its application. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7220/2335-2027.4.9