Bilingual first language acquisition at the interface between syntax and pragmatics

Abstract

The present article provides an overview of some recent research in bilingual first language acquisition with special reference to Romance languages. It addresses two language contact phenomena, language mixing at the lexical level and crosslinguistic influence at the syntactic level. For both contact phenomena, there is evidence that they are unrelated to language dominance (as measured in terms of MLU). Language mixing is negatively correlated with the number of utterances per minute, a measure for language fluency. Cross-linguistic influence at the syntactic level is due to computational complexity which is caused for example by the invasive interplay of pragmatics and syntax. This kind of interplay will be discussed on the basis of the presence or absence of the null-subject property, comparing Italian and German, and by studying the presence or absence of object clitics, comparing French and German. Since cross-linguistic influence affects bilingual individuals to different degrees (sometimes referred to as individual variation), we discuss the assumption that the degree to which the influence manifests itself differs as a function of fluency (measured in words produced per minute). The more fluent the child is in the language with the computationally complex analysis, the less the effect of cross-linguistic influence. In sum, the language which exhibits influence is determined by computational complexity as defined, for example, by the invasive interplay between pragmatics and syntax. The degree of manifestation of the influence depends on fluency in the computationally complex language.

Multicompetence and native speaker variation in clausal packaging in Japanese

“…vowel production (Bullock and Gerfen, 2004), voice onset time (Kehoe et al, 2004;Zampini and Green, 2001), and intonation (Colantoni and Gurlekian, 2004); and syntax and syntax-related interfaces, e.g. verb placement (Döpke, 1998), adjective-noun order (Nicoladis, 2003), tense and aspect (Sanchez, 2004), and argument omission (Montrul, 2004;Müller, 2007;Müller and Hulk, 2001;Serratrice et al, 2004;Toribio, 2004;Yip and Matthews, 2000).…”

Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children: Can input frequency account for it?

“…For the object domain, it has already been shown that there is a strong correlation between language fluency and the amount of object omission (cf. Müller (2008) and Hauser-Grüdl and Arencibia Guerra (2007)). The more fluent the child is/becomes in this language, the less object omissions are observed.…”

“…The nature of the data, spontaneous production data, makes it impossible to disentangle a representational and a processing approach. However, as pointed out by Müller (2008), if a processing approach is to be favored, we would expect external factors to influence the direction of the influence. More specifically, we would expect that a child with German as a weak language shows signs of cross-linguistic influence of the Romance language when using subjects and objects respectively.…”

The development of verbal morphology and word order in an Indonesian-German bilingual child: A case study

“…Recent literature in simultaneous bilingual acquisition has argued that children exposed to two different languages develop separate linguistic systems. However, the potential of one linguistic system affecting the other as a form of cross-linguistic influence has been the focus of considerable research (Genske, 2014;Kang, 2013;Kupisch, 2007;Matthews, Cheung and Yip, 2017;Müller, 2008;Serratrice, Sorace and Paoli, 2004;Yip and Matthews, 2007). There has been continuing debate concerning the domains in which cross-linguistic influence may occur and the possible sources of its occurrence.…”