Ricardo Augusto de Souza

Bilingual innovations: Experimental evidence offers clues regarding the psycholinguistics of language change

Sustained interaction between a bilinguals two languages can be a first step toward diachronic language change. We describe two investigations that explore this by examining how bilinguals process innovative syntactic structures in their first language. In the first investigation, a sentence recall/sentence matching task, bilinguals and monolinguals exhibited differences in their tolerance of expressions of induced motion, which vary in acceptability between the two languages (Portuguese and English). In the second investigation, a priming methodology was employed to induce bilinguals to produce in their first language (Spanish) innovative constructions modeled on the second language (English), using materials where the alternation is shared between the two languages (voice, reciprocal) or not (dative). The two investigations provide a window into how languages interact in bilinguals, inducing tolerance of ungrammaticality which, we will argue, could lead to long-term novel representations in the linguistic competence repositories.

Walking Bilinguals Across Language Boundaries: On-line and Off-line Techniques

This chapter examines off-line and on-line methodologies used to study bilinguals. We demonstrate how methodological choices in experimental design are linked to the theoretical frameworks within which the research is cast. We illustrate how to identify appropriate methodological paradigms drawing from research on the integration of languages in bilinguals, specifically work on how bilinguals process argument structures with different restrictions in the standard grammars of their languages. We report data from Portuguese-English bilinguals and their monolingual counterparts performing three different tasks: off-line acceptability judgments using magnitude estimations, on-line self-paced reading, and sentence recall/sentence matching (i.e., providing whole sentence reading times, speech initiation times, and oral recall errors). With both on-line and off-line measures, bilinguals have different restrictions in argument structures than their monolingual counterparts, in their first language. The overall pattern suggests that these differences are rooted in grammatical representations rather than being driven by performance variables.

Memorização de sentenças com construção específica de uma das línguas de bilíngues

Neste trabalho revisitamos a Hipotese da Regeneracao, que traz uma proposta sobre a natureza do mecanismo psicolinguistico que da suporte a rememoracao imediata de sentencas ouvidas ou lidas, em memoria de curta duracao. O artigo apresenta hipoteses especificas sobre a memorizacao de sentencas por bilingues derivadas dos pressupostos da Hipotese da Regeneracao, e relata um estudo no qual se buscou examinar a acessibilidade de representacoes sintaticas licenciadas em apenas uma das linguas dos bilingues no processamento da outra. Os resultados apontam para tal acessibilidade durante a producao

Selective transfer in the acquisition of English double object constructions by Brazilian learners

The present study investigates the acquisition of the English double object constructions (GOLDBERG, 1995) by Brazilian learners. We hypothesize that, due to first language (L1) influences, the prepositional ditransitive construction (John gave a book to Mary) will be acquired earlier, while the ditransitive construction (John gave Mary a book) will be part of the learner’s interlanguages (SELINKER, 1972) only at the advanced level of proficiency. We also hypothesize that learners may transfer (ODLIN, 1989) the placement of the object pronoun in pre-verbal position from their L1 to their interlanguage in early stages of acquisition (Joao me deu um livro / *John me gave a book). We test our hypotheses by comparing the performance of three groups of learners (beginning, intermediate, and advanced) and native speakers of English on an acceptability judgment task used as a measure of learnability and generalization. Results confirm the order of acquisition of the English double object constructions predicted for native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. Moreover, results suggest that, although mother tongue influences may have taken place, they do not do so pervasively, but rather selectively, corroborating the proposal by Kellerman (1983).