John Benjamins Publishing Company
Processing strategies used by Basque-French bilingual and Basque monolingual children for the production of the subject-agent in Basque
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Abstract
We sought to describe the strategies used by 2L 1 and L 2 Basque-French bilingual children and monolingual Basque children to express subject-agent function in a free elicitation context in Basque. Based on a three-year longitudinal study, the analysis focused on transitive constructions requiring a subject-agent noun marked for ergative case. The results showed that the children mastered production of the ergative case marker at different ages, and used different psycholinguistic strategies to refer to the subject-agent. The majority of the bilingual children favoured topological strategy (i.e., marking of the subject-agent in the first position through subject-verb-object word order). However, the children with L 1 Basque seemed to engage more in morphological strategy, through the use of the nominal ergative suffix. These data allowed us to discuss variations in the performance of bilingual children in light of the cue cost and cue validity concepts elaborated by the Competition Model applied to language production.
Abstract
We sought to describe the strategies used by 2L 1 and L 2 Basque-French bilingual children and monolingual Basque children to express subject-agent function in a free elicitation context in Basque. Based on a three-year longitudinal study, the analysis focused on transitive constructions requiring a subject-agent noun marked for ergative case. The results showed that the children mastered production of the ergative case marker at different ages, and used different psycholinguistic strategies to refer to the subject-agent. The majority of the bilingual children favoured topological strategy (i.e., marking of the subject-agent in the first position through subject-verb-object word order). However, the children with L 1 Basque seemed to engage more in morphological strategy, through the use of the nominal ergative suffix. These data allowed us to discuss variations in the performance of bilingual children in light of the cue cost and cue validity concepts elaborated by the Competition Model applied to language production.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children 1
- Processing strategies used by Basque-French bilingual and Basque monolingual children for the production of the subject-agent in Basque 11
- Bilingual language control across modalities 39
- Bilingual reference production 67
- Investigating vulnerabilities in grammatical processing of bilinguals 99
- Dominance, mode, and individual variation in bilingual speech production and perception 127
- Child heritage speakers’ production and comprehension of direct object clitic gender in Spanish 159
- Basque-Spanish bilingual children’s expressive and receptive grammatical abilities 187
- Adjective-noun order in Papiamento-Dutch code-switching 211
- Production, comprehension and repetition of accusative case by monolingual Russian and bilingual Russian-Dutch and Russian-Hebrew-speaking children 237
- Index 268
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children 1
- Processing strategies used by Basque-French bilingual and Basque monolingual children for the production of the subject-agent in Basque 11
- Bilingual language control across modalities 39
- Bilingual reference production 67
- Investigating vulnerabilities in grammatical processing of bilinguals 99
- Dominance, mode, and individual variation in bilingual speech production and perception 127
- Child heritage speakers’ production and comprehension of direct object clitic gender in Spanish 159
- Basque-Spanish bilingual children’s expressive and receptive grammatical abilities 187
- Adjective-noun order in Papiamento-Dutch code-switching 211
- Production, comprehension and repetition of accusative case by monolingual Russian and bilingual Russian-Dutch and Russian-Hebrew-speaking children 237
- Index 268
