Band 36, Heft 1 - Special Issue: Monolingual and bilingual language acquisition: Harvesting the fruits from the grammar tree

The present article argues that the two effects observed in bilingual first language acquisition, delay and acceleration, have different sources. Whereas delay can be due to cross-linguistic influence on the competence or the performance level and to the mere cognitive burden to process two languages, acceleration is always rooted in efficient computation in a non-linguistic sense. The evidence for the difference between delay and acceleration effects stems from children who are raised bilingually from birth and who are studied during spontaneous speech production. It falls out rather naturally that linguistic development is immune to acceleration, while it can be delayed in bilingual children as compared to monolinguals.

Children between approximately four and five years of age are known to fail in picture matching tasks with verbal stimuli presenting an existentially quantified object NP in the scope of a universally quantified subject NP. In this paper, we suggest an experimentally tested provisional answer to a question that has not been asked in any previous work on the very phenomenon: Would they also fail for the truth-conditionally equivalent stimuli in which the universal quantifier is replaced by a negated existential quantifier (plus a negated predicate, as in Every boy walks with a balloon vs. No boy walks without a balloon ). The experimental results indicate that the latter task is indeed much easier. This lends support to the hypothesis that the primary source of the difficulties lies in the acquisition of a special aspect of compositional semantics, that is, in computing the semantic effects of a universal vs. an existential quantifier as subject in combination with an existential quantifier in the predicate. For a universally quantified subject, the relation between the restrictor set of the quantified subject and the set denoted by the predicate is one of set inclusion. For an existentially quantified subject, it is set intersection. At least for the picture matching tasks, the intersection relation seems to be easier to handle than the inclusion relation, even for semantically equivalent stimuli.

Using the standardized test LiSe-DaZ across four test rounds, we collected elicited production data from 22 typically developing early second language learners (eL2 TD) of German (mean age at T1: 3;7) and 11 older eL2 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (mean age at T1: 7;1). Focusing on the relation between verb placement and verbal inflectional morphology two questions were addressed: Do eL2 children obey the ban on non-finite verbs in verb-second position (V2) in German, and do eL2 SLI children differ from their eL2 TD peers in their morpho-syntactic behavior? This is the first study on this issue to systematically differentiate between V2 and verb-final position (Vf) and between bare verb forms and infinitives, based on a large sample of elicited production data. Results show that from the first test round onwards verbal inflectional morphology and verb placement were strongly related in the TD and the SLI group. Bare verb forms occurred in V2 only and are argued to be finite; en- infinitives were restricted to Vf. We conclude that a) the restrictions for morphological markings are inextricably tied to specific syntactic positions, b) that this knowledge is still accessible when L2 acquisition starts around age 3, and c) that the ban on non-finite verbs in V2 is invulnerable in eL2 TD and in SLI, indicating that SLI is matter of severe delay.

We investigated the acquisition of subject-verb agreement (SVA) in German based on spontaneous speech data from both typically developing (TD) and language-impaired (SLI) children learning German as a second language (L2), and from language-impaired monolingual children. Rothweiler et al. (2012) suggested that SVA is vulnerable in SLI. The intent of our study was to determine whether TD child L2 learners (cL2) in contrast to children with SLI do not have difficulties with SVA. Many studies report that cL2 acquisition can differ from monolingual (L1) acquisition and that the differences look similar to those of impaired L1 learners, which makes it difficult to distinguish cL2 learners who have SLI from those who do not. If such similarities were to be found in the acquisition of SVA in the two bilingual groups, SVA would be ruled out as a possible marker of SLI in cL2 learners. Three groups of children were compared: six Turkish-German early cL2 learners without SLI, and twelve children with SLI – six monolingual German children and six Turkish-German early cL2 learners. As in Rothweiler et al. (2012), all children were advanced learners and were therefore expected to have acquired SVA. We found that the unimpaired early cL2 learners had indeed successfully acquired SVA. In contrast, neither the monolingual nor the bilingual children with SLI succeeded in reliably producing correct SVA.

In a visual-world eye-tracking study, we investigate the on-line comprehension of subject and object which-questions in 60 German-English adult second-language (L2) learners at various stages of proficiency. In particular, we examine whether adult L2 learners follow the same acquisitional trajectories as children or whether L1 transfer dictates a different development. Previous research on monolingual English children shows that child learners initially commit to a strong subject preference and use inflectional cues, i.e. number marking, to overcome structural biases (e.g. Contemori and Marinis 2014b). The adult data on comprehension accuracy show strong effects of proficiency. Intermediate-proficiency L2 learners have an overwhelming structural preference for subject questions, and they are not sensitive to inflectional cues that disambiguate towards object readings. High-intermediate learners come to exploit inflectional cues for revising an initial subject-preference to the target object reading. Finally, advanced learners display native-like comprehension patterns. In contrast to the off-line accuracy data, the analysis of the eye movements shows that all groups of L2 adults make incremental use of inflectional cues in on-line comprehension. These findings indicate that inflectional cues are integrated in the course of L2 development in similar ways as in monolingual development. We discuss the results in the context of current approaches to L2 processing and child-adult differences in language development.

Near-native speakers (heritage speakers and adult second language learners alike) experience difficulty in interpreting and producing linguistic constructions that contain morphologically null elements. We dub this phenomenon the Silent Problem . The bulk of literature on the Silent Problem in near-native speakers has concentrated on the identification and interpretation of null pronominals. In this paper we expand our understanding of the Silent Problem in three ways. First, we show that the range of the problem extends well beyond the grammar of null pronominals. Second, we argue that the various manifestations of the Silent Problem all follow from a typical aspect of near-native grammars: difficulty in recovering missing elements that have discourse antecedents. Third, although heritage and second language speakers show similar difficulties in the recovery of discourse-licensed silent elements, the two speaker populations differ in their evaluation of zero-marked forms in contrastive contexts. We account for this difference by the fact that heritage speakers differ from second language speakers in the comprehension of contrastive material. This comprehension requires good control of the interface between syntax and information structure (including prosodic knowledge), and heritage speakers have an advantage over second language learners in that area.

This paper discusses two patterns of language mixing involving verbal predicates produced by bilingual speakers, the so-called light verb construction and the so-called affixal pattern. The empirical focus of the study is on Greek-German and Cypriot Greek-English varieties, which are contrasted to the Spanish-German variety discussed in González-Vilbazo and López (2011). An analysis of the constructions is offered using the tools of Distributed Morphology and Minimalist Syntax. The paper shows that bilingual speakers have very detailed knowledge of fine properties of their two linguistic systems that become apparent in the context of building verbs.