Raquel Fernández Fuertes

Overt subjects and copula omission in the Spanish and the English grammar of English–Spanish bilinguals: On the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence

The presence of non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories has occupied a central place in both monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition research. In bilingual acquisition a central learnability issue has been to determine whether interlinguistic influence would interact with those patterns. In this article, the authors analyse the omission/production of subject pronouns in the developing Spanish grammar and of copula be in the developing English grammar of two English–Spanish simultaneous bilingual children in order to address the issues of the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence. The authors argue that the directionality of interlinguistic influence is determined by the need to implement core operations of the computational system and that the lexical–semantic interface is an area of the grammar where interlinguistic influence occurs.

Bilingual early functional-lexical mixing and the activation of formal features

We have argued that the grammatical features spell-out hypothesis (GFSH) (Liceras, Spradlin, Perales, Fernández, & Álvarez, 2003; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003a) accounts for the functional-lexical mixing patterns that prevail in the case of Determiner Phrases produced by bilingual (English-Spanish) children. This hypothesis (Liceras, 2002; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003b) states that in the process of activating the features of the two grammars, the child, who will rely on the two lexicons, will make codemixing choices which will favor the functional categories containing the largest array of uninterpretable features (Chomsky, 1998, 1999). This implies that in the case of English/ Spanish child acquisition data, mixed utterances such as el book (Spanish Determiner + English Noun) will prevail over mixed utterances such as the libro (English Determiner + Spanish Noun). Thus, in the process of acquisition, children pay special attention to the visible morpho-phonological triggers which lead to the activation of abstract formal features.

Copula Omission in the English Developing Grammar of English/Spanish Bilingual Children.

Abstract The present study takes as a point of departure Beckers analysis of the copula be in English monolingual data and focuses on the distribution of copula be in the data from two English/Spanish bilingual children. Our data analysis shows that, as in Beckers study, the distribution of copula omission in the bilingual data is determined by the nature of the predicate. However, the omission patterns in our English bilingual data do not coincide with those described by Becker for the English monolingual data, since total omission is very low in our data and there are no significant differences between the stage-level (SL) and the individual-level (IL) predicates. We attribute this to crosslinguistic influence from Spanish, specifically, to the existence of two distinct copulas in Spanish, ser and estar; in particular, we propose that the lexical distinction between these two predicates may trigger the earlier projection of inflection and with it the use of an overt copula in both languages, but specifically in English, and for both SL and IL predicates.

Subject omission/production in child bilingual English and child bilingual Spanish: the view from linguistic theory

Abstract In bilingual child language acquisition research, a recurrent learnability issue has been to investigate whether and how cross-linguistic influence would interact with the non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories. In this paper, we analyze the omission/production of subject pronouns in the earliest stage English grammar and the earliest stage Spanish grammar of two English–Spanish simultaneous bilingual children (FerFuLice corpus in CHILDES). We base this analysis on Holmberg’s (2005, Is there a little pro? Evidence from Finnish. Linguistic Inquiry 36. 533–564) and Sheehan’s (2006, The EPP and null subjects in Romance. Newcastle: Newcastle University PhD dissertation) formulation of the null subject parameter and on Liceras et al.’s (2012, Overt subjects and copula omission in the Spanish and the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: On the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence. First Language 32(1–2). 88–115) assumptions concerning the role of lexical specialization in cross-linguistic influence. We have conducted a comparative analysis of the patterns of production/omission of English and Spanish overt and null subjects in two bilingual children, on the one hand, versus the patterns of production/omission of one monolingual English child and one monolingual Spanish child, on the other. The results show that while there is no conclusive evidence as to whether or not English influences the higher production of overt subjects in child bilingual Spanish, the presence of null subjects in Spanish has a positive influence in the eradication of non-adult null subjects in bilingual English. We argue that in a bilingual situation, as compared to a monolingual one, lexical specialization in one of the languages of the bilinguals (the availability of an overt and a null realization of the subject in Spanish) facilitates the acquisition of the other language.

Bilingualism as a first language: language dominance and crosslinguistic influence

Even though research on bilingual first language acquisition (2L1) could be conceptualized as monolingual acquisition (L1) of two individual languages, the fact that in 2L1 acquisition there is exposure to input from two languages has consequences in terms of how the two language systems interact in the mind of the bilingual. This century has seen two important developments in this respect. First, a consensus seems to have been reached on the idea that the two systems are differentiated from the early stages (e.g. Genesee, 1989; De Houwer, 1990; Genesee, Nicoladis & Paradis, 1995; Köppe & Meisel, 1995; Genesee, 2003). The second development is related to how the 2L1 language faculty compares to the L1 language faculty and the consideration that the grammatical processes and operations in both bilingual and monolingual speech must be accounted for in the same terms (MacSwan, 2000; Liceras, Spradlin & Fernández Fuertes, 2005; Liceras et al., 2008, among others). However, while it is unquestionable that L1 and 2L1 acquisition share similar mechanisms and processes, there are core issues such as language dominance, crosslinguistic influence and code-mixing that are specific to simultaneous bilingual acquisition. In this chapter, we address these three language contact phenomena by analyzing spontaneous and experimental data from the simultaneous bilingual acquisition of English and Spanish by two identical twins in Spain (FerFuLice corpus in CHILDES) as it compares to data from other 2L1 and L2 children and adults. We conceptualize language dominance in terms of the computational value of grammatical features in a given language. And so, the dominant language is the one that provides the functional category whenever that category is highly grammaticized. Crosslinguistic influence between the two languages of a bilingual is analyzed in the case of sentential subjects and copula predicates and we propose that the occurrence as well as the directionality of influence is linked to lexical specialization. Therefore, the presence of two sets of subjects (i.e. overt and null) and two sets of copulas (i.e. ser and estar) in Spanish leads to a lack of negative influence from English into Spanish. However, a facilitation effect appears in bilingual English as seen in bilinguals’ lower copula omission rates and lower null subject rate. In terms of code-mixing patterns between Determiners and Nouns, child and adult spontaneous production data differ from experimental data in that while the former show a preference for the Spanish Determiner (the category which is more grammaticized), the latter prefer the English Determiner. We propose constructs such as the Grammatical Features Spell-Out hypothesis or the Analogical Criterion to account for these patterns. The analysis of these language contact phenomena provides an insight on how language properties shape bilingual production.

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Bilingual children as interpreters in everyday life: how natural interpreting reinforces minority languages

Children that grow up bilingually often interpret naturally between their two languages. This has been shown to be so in a variety of language pairs, regardless of children’s social and family situ...ABSTRACT Children that grow up bilingually often interpret naturally between their two languages. This has been shown to be so in a variety of language pairs, regardless of children’s social and family situations and both within the family context as well as between the family and society (e.g. Álvarez de la Fuente and Fernández Fuertes 2012. “How two English/Spanish Bilingual Children Translate: In Search for Bilingual Competence Through Natural Interpretation.” In Interpreting Brian Harris. Recent Developments in Translatology, edited by M. A. Jiménez Ivars and M. J. Blasco Mayor, 95–115. Viena: Peter Lang; Angelelli (2016). “Looking Back: A Study of (ad-hoc) Family Interpreters.” European Journal of Applied Linguistics 4 (1): 451–431. doi:10.1515/eujal-2015-0029). This study analyses different contextual and linguistic variables that define the natural interpreting instances produced in spontaneous interactions by 19 young bilingual children (average age: 3;7) with different language pairs. In particular, we aim at characterising the bilingual practice used by these children and (i) involve the consecutive use of their two languages and (ii) are shaped by the communicative strategies used by parents at home. The analysis is based on freely available corpora in CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Retrieved from http://childes.psy.cmu.edu) (i.e. FerFuLice, Pérez-Bazán, Ticio, Vila, Deuchar, ; GNP) and diary annotations (i.e. Ronjat 1913. Le developpement du langage observe chez un enfant bilingue [The development of the language observed in a bilingual child]. Paris: Librairie Ancienne H. Champion; Leopold 1939–1949; Lanza 1988. “Language Strategies in the Home: Linguistic Input and Infant Bilingualism.” In Bilingualism and the Individual, edited by A. Holmen, E. Hansen, J. Gimbel, and J. N. Jørgensen, 69–84. Clevedon, UK: Multingual Matters, Lanza 1997. Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Lanza 2001. “Bilingual First Language Acquisition: A Discourse Perspective on Language Contact in Parent-Child Interaction.” In Trends in Bilingual Acquisition, edited by J. Cenoz, and F. Genesee, 201–229. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/tilar.1.10lan) that comprise the spontaneous and longitudinal production of these children. Our results show that the language strategies followed by parents at home in combination with the linguistic communities where they live play a key role on this bilingual practice.

The acquisition of grammatical gender in L1 bilingual Spanish

We analyze the emergence of grammatical gender in the spontaneous longitudinal Spanish production of a set of Spanish/English bilingual twins from the FerFuLice corpus (Fernandez Fuertes & Liceras, 2009). We take as a point of departure theoretical accounts on gender assignment and gender concord and previous empirical work on the acquisition of gender by monolinguals and bilinguals. Our study deals with how gender incorporates in the case of L1 Spanish bilinguals; how concord within the determiner phrase (DP) operates; and how monolingual and bilingual Spanish pattern in the same way in this respect. We conclude that DP syntax and the gender concord valuation mechanism are in place from very early stages and that morphology and semantics are not determinant factors in this process.