Exploring the source of differences and similarities in L1 attrition and heritage speaker competence: Evidence from pronominal resolution

Abstract

Please cite this article in press as: Kaltsa, M., et al., Exploring the source of differences and similarities in L1 attrition and heritage speaker competence: Evidence from pronominal resolution. Lingua (2015), http://dx. AbstractSeveral studies of different bilingual groups including L2 learners, child bilinguals, heritage speakers and L1 attriters reveal similar performance on syntax-discourse interface properties such as anaphora resolution (Sorace, 2011 and references therein). Specifically, bilinguals seem to allow more optionality in the interpretation of overt subject pronouns in null subject languages, such as Greek, Italian and Spanish while the interpretation of null subject pronouns is indistinguishable from monolingual natives. Nevertheless, there is some evidence pointing to bilingualism effects on the interpretation of null subject pronouns too in heritage speakers' grammars (Montrul, 2004) due to some form of 'arrested' development in this group of bilinguals. The present study seeks to investigate similarities and differences between two Greek--Swedish bilingual groups, heritage speakers and L1 attriters, in anaphora resolution of null and overt subject pronouns in Greek using a self-paced listening with a sentence-picture matching decision task at the end of each sentence. The two groups differ in crucial ways: heritage speakers were simultaneous or early bilinguals while the L1 attriters were adult learners of the second language, Swedish. Our findings reveal differences from monolingual preferences in the interpretation of the overt pronoun for both heritage and attrited speakers while the differences attested between the two groups in the interpretation of null subject pronouns affect only response times with heritage being faster than attrited speakers. We argue that our results do not support an age of onset or differential input effects on bilingual performance in pronoun resolution.

The role of prosody in overt pronoun resolution in a null subject language and in a non-null subject language: A production study

“…As mentioned above, the results of this study suggest that, in an intra-sentential anaphora, Italian speakers associate null pronouns with the antecedent in the highest SpecIP of the phrase structure (usually the subject) and associate overt pronouns with an antecedent in a syntactic position lower than the SpecIP of the phrase structure (usually the object), as shown in (1). 1 This theory is known as the Position of Antecedent Strategy (PAS) and represents the basis of a large body of research on monolingual and bilingual anaphora resolution in different languages (Sorace & Filiaci 2006;Kaltsa, Tsimpli & Rothman 2015;Papadopoulou et al 2015;Chamorro, Sorace & Sturt 2016, among many others). The PAS refers to the Italian strong pronouns lui/lei but not to their alternative weak forms egli/ella.…”

Input effects across domains: The case of Greek subjects in child heritage language

“…According to generative approaches, the rich agreement morphology of the verbal paradigm in null subject languages syntactically licenses or allows for null (phonologically unexpressed) subjects (Rizzi, 1982). In these languages, the alternation between null and overt pronominal subjects is constrained by discourse factors, in that there is a preference for null pronouns to refer to topical subject antecedents and for overt pronouns to mark topic shift and contrastive focus (for Greek, see Kaltsa et al, 2015;Papadopoulou, Peristeri, Plemenou, Marinis & Tsimpli, 2015;Tsimpli et al, 2004; for Italian, see Belletti et al, 2007;Carminati, 2002;for Spanish, see Alonso-Ovalle, Fernandez-Solera, Frazier & Clinton, 2002;see, also, Filiaci, 2010, for differences among Italian and Spanish). The Italian sentences in (1), taken from Carminati (2002), illustrate this point:…”

“…Greek alongside a non-null subject language (for Greek-English simultaneous bilingual children living in the UK, see Argyri & Sorace, 2007; for adult heritage speakers of Greek living in Sweden, see Kaltsa et al, 2015; for Greek attriters, see Tsimpli et al, 2004). As to the selection of heritage speakers, it was motivated by the empirical observation that they differ significantly from each other in their daily amount of heritage language use (Montrul, 2015;Unsworth, 2017).…”

“…Two research questions were addressed: To answer these questions, we replicated Argyri and Sorace's (2007) In what follows, we will first present the syntactic literature and the properties of the target structures and we will then turn to our predictions. However, as discussed in section 2, the alternation between these two forms is constrained by discourse factors, in that null subjects are preferably interpreted as coreferential with the most salient linguistic antecedent (that is with the subject/topic of a previous sentence), whereas overt pronominal subjects typically mark topic shift (for Greek, see Kaltsa, et al, 2015;Papadopoulou et al, 2015;and Tsimpli et al, 2004). This is illustrated with 3 Whereas the null pronominal subject (pro) in (3b) is associated with the subject of the previous utterance (i.e., Kostas) leading to a -Topic Shift interpretation, the overt pronominal subject (aftos 'he') in (3c) is most naturally understood as referring to an extra-linguistic entity, leading to a +Topic Shift interpretation.…”

“…To our knowledge, though, no study to date has examined the differential effect of input quantity, as a continuous variable, within the same group of heritage speakers. Furthermore, there are fewer studies on child than on adult heritage language (Cuza, 2016;Jia & Paradis, 2015) and only a handful of studies has examined Greek as a heritage language (Kaltsa, Tsimpli & Rothman, 2015;Dosi, 2017;Zomboulou, 2011). To address this gap, in our study we examined subject realisation and placement in Greek-English bilingual children learning Greek as a heritage language in North America and investigated whether the amount of heritage language use can predict their performance in the syntax-discourse and narrow syntactic contexts.…”