Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wzw2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-07T09:50:35.943Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Pronominal objects in English–Italian and Spanish–Italian bilingual children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2011

LUDOVICA SERRATRICE ,
ANTONELLA SORACE ,
FRANCESCA FILIACI  and
MICHELA BALDO
LUDOVICA SERRATRICE*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
ANTONELLA SORACE
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
FRANCESCA FILIACI
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
MICHELA BALDO
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Ludovica Serratrice, University of Manchester, School of Psychological Sciences, Ellen Wilkinson Building, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom. E-mail: serratrice@manchester.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study investigated the role of typological relatedness, language of the community, and age, in predicting similarities and differences between English–Italian, Spanish–Italian bilingual children and their monolingual child and adult counterparts in the acceptability of pre- and postverbal object pronouns in [±focus] contexts in Italian and in English. Cross-linguistic influence occurred in [−focus] contexts as a function of typological relatedness and language of the community. English–Italian bilinguals in the UK accepted pragmatically inappropriate postverbal pronouns in [−focus] contexts in Italian twice as often as all the other groups. Cross-linguistic influence was unidirectional from English to Italian as shown by the categorical rejection of preverbal pronouns in [−focus] contexts in English. In [+focus] contexts, in English no significant differences existed between the monolinguals and the bilinguals in the low accuracy with which they chose pragmatically appropriate stressed pronouns. Similarly, the choice of appropriate pronouns in [+focus] contexts in Italian was problematic for monolingual and bilingual children irrespective of the language of the community and of the bilinguals’ other language. Age was a factor only for the Italian children who approached adultlike performance in [+focus] contexts only by the age of 10. These findings point to the need for a multifaceted approach to account for similarities and differences between the linguistic behavior of bilingual and monolingual children.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , October 2012 , pp. 725 - 751
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abbot-Smith, K. & Behrens, H. (2006). How known constructions influence the acquisition of other constructions: The German passive and future constructions. Cognitive Science, 30, 995–1026.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Allen, S. (1997). A discourse–pragmatic explanation for the subject–object asymmetry in early null arguments: The principle of informativeness revisited. In Sorace, A., Heycock, C., & Shillcock, R. (Eds.), Proceedings of the GALA ‘97 Conference on Language Acquisition (pp. 10–15). Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Allen, S., Skarabela, B., & Hughes, M. (2008). Using corpora to examine discourse effects in syntax. In Behrens, H. (Ed.), Corpora in language acquisition research: Finding structure in data (pp. 99–137). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Antelmi, D. (1997). La prima grammatica italiana. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
Argyri, E., & Sorace, A. (2007). Cross-linguistic influence and language dominance in older bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 77–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Avrutin, S. (1999). Development of the syntax–discourse interface. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Belletti, A., Bennati, E., & Sorace, A. (2007). Theoretical and developmental issues in the syntax of subjects: Evidence from near-native Italian. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 25, 657–689.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bottari, P., Cipriani, P., Chilosi, A. M., & Pfanner, L. (2001). The Italian determiner system in normal acquisition, specific language impairment, and childhood aphasia. Brain and Language, 77, 283–293.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cantone, K (2007). Code-switching in bilingual children. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cardinaletti, A., & Starke, M. (1999). The typology of structural deficiency. In van Riemsdijk, H. (Ed.), Clitics in the languages of Europe (pp. 145–233). Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Chafe, W. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of view. In Li, C. N. (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 25–55). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Chafe, W. (1994). Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Chang, F., Dell, G. S., & Bock, K. (2006). Becoming syntactic. Psychological Review, 113, 234–272.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cipriani, P., Pfanner, P., Chilosi, A.M., Cittadoni, L., Ciuti, A., Maccari, A., et al. (1989). Protocolli diagnostici e terapeutici nello sviluppo e nella patologia del linguaggio (1/84 Ministry of Health). Pisa: Stella Maris Foundation.Google Scholar
Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing and modularity. In Clifton, C., Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Cruttenden, A. (1985). Intonation comprehension in ten-year-olds. Journal of Child Language, 12, 643–661.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Groot, A., Delmaar, P., & Lupker, S. (2000). The processing of interlexical homographs in translation recognition and lexical decision: Support for non-selective access to bilingual memory. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53A, 397–428.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Houwer, A. (1990). The acquisition of two languages from birth: A case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dijkstra, T., van Jaarsveld, H., & ten Brinke, S. (1998). Interlingual homograph recognition: Effects of task demands and language intermixing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 51–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dijkstra, T., Timmermans, M., & Schriefers, H. (2000). On being blinded by your other language: Effects of task demands on interlingual homograph recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 42, 445–464.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Döpke, S. (1998). Competing language structures: The acquisition of verb placement by bilingual German–English children. Journal of Child Language, 25, 555–584.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Foroodi-Nejad, F., & Paradis, J. (2009). Cross-linguistic transfer in the acquisition of compound words in Persian–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 411–427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Genesee, F., Nicoladis, E., & Paradis, J. (1995). Language differentiation in early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language, 22, 611–631.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Guasti, M. T. (1994). Verb syntax in Italian child grammar: Finite and nonfinite verbs. Language Acquisition, 3, 1–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacohen, A., & Schaeffer, J. (2007). Subject realization in early Hebrew/English bilingual acquisition: The role of cross-linguistic influence. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 333–344.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartsuiker, R., Pickering, M., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish–English bilinguals. Psychological Science, 15, 409–414.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hulk, A., & Müller, N. (2000). Bilingual first language acquisition at the interface between syntax and pragmatics. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3, 227–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, J., & Elman, J. (2001). A connectionist investigation of linguistic arguments from the poverty of the stimulus: Learning the unlearnable. In Moore, J. & Stenning, K. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 552–557). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Mayol, L. (2006). The discourse function of right-dislocation in Catalan. In Fabricius-Hansen, C., Behrens, B., & Krave, M. F. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sprik Conference: Explicit and implicit information in text. Information structure across languages (pp. 35–40). University of Oslo, SPRåk I Contrast.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. (1989). Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In Hyltenstam, K. & Obler, L. (Eds.), Bilingualism across the lifespan: Aspects of acquisition, maturity and loss (pp. 13–40). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, N., & Hulk, A. (2001). Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicoladis, E. 2006. Cross-linguistic transfer in adjective-noun strings by preschool bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9, 15–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. (2001). Do bilingual two-year-olds have separate phonological systems? International Journal of Bilingualism, 5, 19–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J., & Navarro, S. (2003). Subject realization and cross-linguistic interference in the bilingual acquisition of Spanish and English: What is the role of the input? Journal of Child Language, 30, 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J., Crago, M., & Genesee, F. (2005/2006). Domain-general versus domain-specific accounts of Specific Language Impairment: Evidence from bilingual children's acquisition of object pronouns. Language Acquisition, 13, 33–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patterson, J., & Pearson, B.Z. (2004). Bilingual lexical development: Influences, contexts, and processes. In Goldstein, G. (Ed.), Bilingual language development and disorders in Spanish–English speakers (pp. 77–104). Baltimore, MD: Paul Brookes.Google Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A.T., Pirvulescu, M., & Roberge, Y. (2009). Bilingualism as a window into the language faculty: The acquisition of objects in French-speaking children in bilingual and monolingual contexts. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 97–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Radford, A., Kupisch, T., Köppe, R., & Azzaro, G. (2007). Concord, convergence and crash- avoidance in bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 239–256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reali, F., & Christiansen, M. (2005). Uncovering the richness of the stimulus: Structure dependence and indirect statistical evidence. Cognitive Science, 29, 1007–1028.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Reinhart, T. (1995). Interface strategies. OTS Working Papers in Linguistics TL-95-002. Utrecht: University of Utrecht.Google Scholar
Reinhart, T. (2004). The processing cost of reference-set computation: Acquisition of stress shift and focus. Language Acquisition, 12, 109–155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, L., Gullberg, M., & Indefrey, P. (2008). Subject pronoun resolution in second language discourse: An eye-tracking study with Turkish and German learners of Dutch. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30, 333–357.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, A. (2002). Genitive variation in English. Conceptual factors in synchronic and diachronic studies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaeffer, J. (2000). The acquisition of direct object scrambling and clitic placement: Syntax and pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schoonbaert, S., Hartsuiker, R., & Pickering, M. (2007). The representation of lexical and syntactic information in bilinguals: Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 153–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serratrice, L. (2007a). Interpretation of anaphoric expressions: English–Italian bilingual children and Italian monolingual controls. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 225–238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serratrice, L. (2007b). Referential cohesion in the narratives of bilingual English–Italian children and monolingual peers. Journal of Pragmatics, 39, 1058–1087.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serratrice, L., Sorace, A., Filiaci, F., & Baldo, M. (2009). Bilingual children's sensitivity to specificity and genericity: Evidence from metalinguistic awareness. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 239–257.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serratrice, L., Sorace, A., & Paoli, S. (2004). Subjects and objects in Italian–English bilingual and monolingual acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7, 183–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorace, A., Serratrice, L., Filiaci, F., & Baldo, M. (2009). Discourse conditions on subject pronoun realization: Testing the linguistic intuitions of older bilingual children. Lingua, 119, 460–477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silva-Corválan, C., & Montanari, S. (2008). The acquisition of ser, estar (and be) by a Spanish–English bilingual child: The early stages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 341–360.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szendroi, K., & Costa, J. (2006). Acquisition of focus marking in European Portuguese—Evidence for a unified approach to focus. In Torrens, V. & Escobar, L. (Eds.), The acquisition of syntax in Romance languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Tedeschi, R. (2006). The acquisition of object clitics in Italian: Data from an elicited production task. Annali Online di Ferrara—Lettere, 2, 31–42.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, T., Sorace, A., Heycock, C., & Filiaci, F. (2004). First language attrition and syntactic subjects: A study of Greek and Italian near-native speakers of English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 8, 257–277.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vallduví, E. (2002). L'oració com a unitat informativa. In Solà, J., Lloret, M. R., Mascaró, J., & Pérez Saldanya, M. (Eds.), Gramàtica del català contemporani. Barcelona: Empúries.Google Scholar
Wang, Q., Lillo-Martin, D., Best, C., & Levitt, A. (1992). Null subject versus null object: Some evidence from the acquisition of Chinese and English. Language Acquisition, 2, 221–254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Hell, J., & Dijkstra, T. (2002). Foreign language knowledge can influence native language performance in exclusively native contexts. Psychonomic Bulletin Review, 9, 780–789.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
van Heuven, W., Dijkstra, T., & Grainger, J. (1998). Orthographic neighborhood effects in bilingual word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 458–483.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
von Studnitz, R., & Green, D. (2002). Interlingual homograph interference in German–English bilinguals: Its modulation and locus of control. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5, 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, B., Peppé, S., & Goulandris, N. (2004). Intonation development from five to thirteen. Journal of Child Language, 31, 749–778.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wolford, T. (2006). Variation in the expression of possession by Latino children. Language Variation and Change, 19, 1–13.Google Scholar
Yip, V., & Matthews, S.Syntactic transfer in a Cantonese–English bilingual child. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3, 193–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zobl, H. (1980). The formal and developmental selectivity of L1 influence on L2 acquisition. Language Learning, 30, 43–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar