Referential expressions in bilingual acquisition

Abstract

Just like monolingual children, bilingual children need to carve up the referential space to understand and produce discourse-appropriate referential expressions. In the case of bilinguals, this demanding task additionally requires language-specific formfunction mappings that may be structurally similar or different in their two languages.Cases of partial form-function overlap across languages, especially with respect to third person pronouns, have been the focus of much scrutiny in connection with the issue of cross-linguistic influence. In this chapter we review naturalistic and experimental evidence showing how the degree of structural overlap across two languages, the degree of variability in the target language(s), and the amount of input that is necessary to home in on the target grammar(s) constrain the comprehension and production of referential expressions in bilingual acquisition.

Heritage Portuguese and Heritage Polish in Contact with German: More Evidence on the Production of Objects

“…The main focus lays on their production of referential expressions and their realization through different types of direct objects (definite noun phrases (NPs), clitic pronouns, null objects). The production (and comprehension) of referential expressions requires the acquisition of syntactic knowledge, namely the knowledge of the inventory of referential forms in the target language (e.g., the availability of null objects or clitic pronouns), and the knowledge of semantic-pragmatic knowledge of the properties that constrain the distribution of these forms (Serratrice and Hervé 2015). Additionally, cognitive abilities modulate children's performance in reference encoding (De Cat 2015).…”

Early null and overt subjects in the Spanish of simultaneous English-Spanish bilinguals and Crosslinguistic Influence

“…As Serratrice and Hervé (2015) note, the studies conducted by Juan-Garau and Pérez-Vidal (2000), , SilvaCorvalán (2014), and Zwanziger et al (2005) did not find evidence in support of CLI based on the relative proportion of null and overt subjects in children's naturalistic productions (see also Gutiérrez-Clellen, Simon-Cerejido, andWagner, 2008 andLiceras et al, 2012); their performance regarding the rate of non-overt and lexical subjects was reminiscent of that of monolinguals, challenging the CLI hypothesis. Nonetheless, Serratrice and Hervé (2015) emphasize the need to investigate the issue of whether subjects are pragmatically appropriate, since CLI is tightly connected to the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics, a consideration that was indeed taken into account by some studies.…”

“…This being said, the SDH does not exclude the possibility of interlinguistic influence from one language to the other. In fact, there is substantial evidence that there is cross-language interference in bilingualism (see, e.g., Serratrice and Hervé, 2015, and references therein).…”

“…As far as the issue of CLI is concerned, recall that if the CLI hypothesis is to be taken seriously, attention should also be devoted to the pragmatic felicitousness of children's early subjects (Paradis and Navarro, 2003;Serratrice and Hervé, 2015). The early performance of the Spanish-acquiring children in bilingual contexts regarding null subjects shows no apparent CLI effects.…”

“…The longitudinal study conducted by Silva-Corvalán (2014), using a larger amount of data than any other study, considers the development of two siblings from age 1;6 to age 5;11, with differences in terms of language exposure that, over time, correlate with different patterns of lexical subject realization in Spanish (Serratrice and Hervé, 2015). 7 From very early on, the siblings treat subjects differently in the two languages, the proportion of overt subjects in English being almost double than that in the Spanish data, revealing a developmental path similar to that of monolinguals.…”