Acquisition of null objects in Mandarin Chinese by heritage speakers

Abstract

The acquisition of the grammatical knowledge related to inflectional morphology and syntax-pragmatics interface have both been shown to be challenging for heritage speakers (e.g., Montrul et al. 2008; Polinsky 2006, 2008; Sorace et al. 2009; Montrul 2009; Benmamoun et al. 2013a; Laleko & Polinsky 2016). In these previous work on heritage language acquisition, the acquisition of inflectional morphology (e.g. either agreement morphology or topic marking) is also a relevant acquisition task associated with the syntax-discourse phenomena under investigation. In this paper we focus on the acquisition of discourse-conditioned structures by heritage speakers when inflectional morphology is not part of the learning task. Specifically, we report results of a picture-verification experiment focusing on English-dominant heritage Chinese speakers’ grammatical knowledge of null objects. As a topic-prominent language lacking verbal tense/agreement morphology, the licensing and identification of null arguments in Chinese has nothing to do with agreement morphology. In addition, unlike other topic-prominent pro-drop languages, Chinese has no inflectional morphology associated with grammatical subjects/objects and topic phrases. Without the interference of co-occurring inflectional morphology, we found that there is no significant difference between heritage Chinese speakers and the monolingual baseline in their acceptance of null objects in contextually appropriate contexts. The results of our study cast doubt on the thesis that heritage speakers are unable to acquire discourse-related knowledge (cf. Sorace & Serratrice 2009; Laleko 2010; Laleko & Polinsky 2016) and support Yuan’s (2010) claim that interface categories should not be considered holistically.

Teaching and Learning Chinese as a Foreign or Second Language: The Educational Psychology Perspective

“…Most of these studies examined Spanish as a heritage language, with the target phenomena including the use of definite articles (Montrul and Ionin, 2010), subject position preferences with intransitive predicates across informational contexts (De Prada Pérez and Pascual y Cabo, 2012), clitic right dislocation (Leal et al, 2014), presentational focus (Hoot, 2017), etc., all of which are regulated at the external interface in Spanish. A few studies addressed acquisition at interfaces in East Asian languages as heritage languages, with the target phenomena examined so far including topic markers in heritage Korean and Japanese (Laleko and Polinsky, 2016) and null objects in heritage Mandarin Chinese (Chou et al, 2020). 3 In terms of methods, these studies all adopted acceptability/felicity judgment tasks as the main instruments (although the specific design of each study may vary).…”