Ludovica Serratrice

Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development: Beyond structural overlap:

This article deals with the interface between syntax and discoursepragmatics/semantics in bilingual speakers. Linguistic phenomena at the interface have been shown to be especially vulnerable in both child and adult bilinguals; here we explore four variables that contribute to this vulnerability to different extents depending on the nature of the interface: underspecification, cross-linguistic influence, quantity and quality of the input, and processing limitations. We investigate the role played by the aforementioned variables in two recently completed studies. One compares the performance of English— Italian and Spanish—Italian bilingual children, monolingual English- and Italian-speaking children and adults on forced-choice grammaticality tasks on the distribution of overt and null subject pronouns in Italian and in English. The second explores bilingual and monolingual speakers’ sensitivity to the presence of definite articles in specific and generic plural noun phrases in Italian and in English. We show that over and above structural overlap, other factors must be We show that over and above structural overlap, other factors must be included to account for differences in the behavioural data in the two tasks and in different populations of bilinguals and monolinguals. We argue that processing factors play a non-trivial role in the difficulty encountered by bilinguals in coordinating syntax with contextual discourse-pragmatic information, regardless of the absence or presence of partial structural overlap. In the case of the internal coordination between syntax and semantics, processing factors may be less likely to affect bilinguals’ performance, while the extent of structural overlap and the associated internal formal features seem to play a more important role.

Crosslinguistic influence at the syntax–pragmatics interface: Subjects and objects in English–Italian bilingual and monolingual acquisition

The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime candidates to test the interaction between syntax and pragmatics, and we compared the distribution of subjects and objects in the Italian and English of a bilingual child (1;10–4;6) with that of two groups of MLUw-matched monolinguals. All arguments were coded for syntactic function and for a number of discourse pragmatic features predicted to affect their realisation. Our main prediction was that unidirectional crosslinguistic influence might occur for the English–Italian bilingual child with respect to pronominal subject and object use after the instantiation of the C system. Specifically we predicted that in Italian the bilingual child might use overt pronominal subjects in contexts where monolinguals would use a null subject, and that he might use postverbal strong object pronouns in Italian instead of preverbal weak pronominal clitics. Conversely, we did not expect the overall proportion of overt objects, whether noun phrases or pronouns, to vary crosslinguistically as objects are always obligatorily overt in both languages regardless of discourse pragmatics. Our results confirmed these predictions, and corroborated the argument that crosslinguistic influence may occur in bilingual first language acquisition in specific contexts in which syntax and pragmatics interact.

The role of discourse pragmatics in the acquisition of subjects in Italian

This longitudinal study investigates the distribution of null and overt subjects in the spontaneous production of six Italian-speaking children between the ages of 1 year, 7 months and 3 years, 3 months. Like their peers acquiring other Romance null-subject languages, the children in this sample produced more overt subjects as their mean length of utterance in words (MLUW) increased. Pronominal subjects, and specifically first person pronouns, accounted for an increasingly larger proportion of the overt subjects used. The distribution of both pronominal and lexical subjects was further investigated as a function of the informativeness value of a number of pragmatically relevant features. The results showed that as early as MLUW 2.0 Italian-speaking children can use null and overt subjects in a pragmatically appropriate way. The relevance of these findings is discussed with reference to performance limitation and syntactic accounts of subject omission, and implications are drawn for a model of language development that incorporates the mastery of pragmatics in the acquisition of syntax.

Bilingual children's sensitivity to specificity and genericity: Evidence from metalinguistic awareness

A number of recent studies have argued that bilingual childrens language comprehension and production may be affected by cross-linguistic influence. The overall aim of this study was to investigate whether the ability to judge the grammaticality of a construction in one language is affected by knowledge of the corresponding construction in the other language. We investigated how English–Italian and Spanish–Italian bilingual children and monolingual peers judged the grammaticality of plural NPs in specific and generic contexts in English and in Italian. We also explored whether language of the community, age, and the typological relatedness of the bilinguals’ two languages significantly affected their performance. While performance in English was overall poor, no significant differences existed between the English–Italian bilinguals and the monolinguals. In contrast, we found that knowledge of English affected the bilinguals’ ability to discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in Italian. The English–Italian bilinguals were significantly less accurate than both the monolinguals and the Spanish–Italian bilinguals in a task where they simply had to rely on the local definite article cue to reject ungrammatical bare plurals in generic contexts. Language of the community and age also played a significant role in childrens accuracy.

Cross-linguistic influence in the interpretation of anaphoric and cataphoric pronouns in English–Italian bilingual children

This study reports the results of a picture verification task assessing the interpretation of intra-sentential anaphora and cataphora in Italian by a group of English–Italian bilingual eight-year-olds, a group of age-matched Italian monolinguals, and a group of Italian monolingual adults. No significant differences between the groups were observed in the choice of a subject antecedent for null anaphoric pronouns, and only marginally significant differences were reported between the adults and the two groups of children for the interpretation of null cataphoric pronouns. By contrast, overt pronominal subjects were accepted as co-referential with a subject antecedent significantly more often by the bilingual children than by the monolingual children and the adults in the anaphoric condition, and both groups of children accepted a subject as the antecedent of an overt cataphoric pronoun significantly more often than the adults. These results are interpreted in the context of language-universal and language-specific processing strategies in anaphora resolution in bilingual and monolingual acquisition.

First Language Transfer and Long-Term Structural Priming in Comprehension.

The present study investigated L1 transfer effects in L2 sentence processing and syntactic priming through comprehension in speakers of German and Italian. L1 and L2 speakers of both languages participated in a syntactic priming experiment that aimed to shift their preferred interpretation of ambiguous relative clause constructions. The results suggested that L1 transfer affects L2 processing but not the strength of structural priming, and therefore does not hinder the acquisition of L2 parsing strategies. We also report evidence that structural priming through comprehension can persist in L1 and L2 speakers over an experimental phase without further exposure to primes. Finally, we observed that priming can occur for what are essentially novel form-meaning pairings for L2 learners, suggesting that adult learners can rapidly associate existing forms with new meanings.

Vocabulary profiles of children with specific language impairment

This study investigates vocabulary development over one year for three young children with specific language impairment (SLI). Rate of vocabulary development and use of nouns and verbs relative to total vocabulary is compared with a larger sample of younger, typically developing children. Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) data were collected and results provided a typically developing trajectory against which the children with SLI could be compared. The two groups show similar growth curves at these early stages. Findings are discussed with reference to previous work on vocabulary development and methodological differences between parental report and naturalistic data collection.

Children do not overcome lexical biases where adults do: the role of the referential scene in garden-path recovery

In this paper we report on a visual world eye-tracking experiment that investigated the differing abilities of adults and children to use referential scene information during reanalysis to overcome lexical biases during sentence processing. The results showed that adults incorporated aspects of the referential scene into their parse as soon as it became apparent that a test sentence was syntactically ambiguous, suggesting they considered the two alternative analyses in parallel. In contrast, the children appeared not to re-analyze their initial analysis, even over shorter distances than have been investigated in prior research. We argue that this reflects the childrens over-reliance on bottom-up, lexical cues to interpretation. The implications for the development of parsing routines are discussed.

The Role of Discourse and Perceptual Cues in the Choice of Referential Expressions in English Preschoolers, School-Age Children, and Adults

Two studies investigated the choice of referential expressions in a referential communication game for English-speaking adults, preschoolers, and young school-age children. The aim was to determine to what extent children and adults rely on discourse and perceptual information in their use of lexical noun phrases (NPs) vs. pronouns and null reference. Study 1 crossed two variables: the focus structure of the question asked (sentence focus vs. predicate focus) and the perceptual availability of the referent to the listener (listener looking vs. listener not looking). Study 2 manipulated the number of referents (one vs. two) and the perceptual availability of the referent(s) to the listener (listener looking vs. listener not looking). The results show that adults and children alike were very sensitive to the discourse cue provided by the focus structure of the question asked; participants used more lexical NPs with sentence focus constructions. The number of referents was also a reliable predictor of the type of referential expression used, although even school-age children produced fewer lexical NPs than adults in two-referent contexts. By contrast, taking into account the perceptual availability of the referent to the listener was the variable that posed the largest number of difficulties to all groups of children; even the oldest six-year-olds did not reliably produce a lexical NP when the listener could not see the referent. These findings contribute new experimental evidence on childrens developing sensitivity to different types of discourse and perceptual cues in argument realization.

Tense over time: testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model as an account of the pattern of tense-marking provision in early child English

The Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM) predicts that English-speaking children will show similar patterns of provision across different tense-marking morphemes (Rice, Wexler & Hershberger, 1998). The aim of the present study was to test this prediction by examining provision rates for third person singular present tense and first and third person singular forms of copula BE and auxiliary BE in longitudinal data from eleven English-speaking children between the ages of 1;10 and 3;0. The results show, first, that there were systematic differences in the provision rates of the different morphemes; second, that there were systematic differences in the rate at which all of the three morphemes were provided with pronominal and lexical subjects; and, third, that there were systematic differences in the rate at which copula BE and auxiliary BE were provided with the third person singular pronominal subjects It and He and the first person singular subject pronoun I. These results replicate those of Wilson (2003), while controlling for some possible objections to Wilsons analysis. They thus provide further evidence against the generativist view that childrens rates of provision of different tense-marking morphemes are determined by a single underlying factor, and are consistent with the constructivist view that childrens rates of provision reflect the gradual accumulation of knowledge about tense marking, with much of childrens early knowledge being embedded in lexically specific constructions.