The next ComSyn meeting will take place on Tuesday 20 November.
Speaker: Luisa Meroni (Universiteit Utrecht)
Title: Specific indefinite objects in bilingual acquisition.
Time: 15:15-16:30
Venue: Lipsius 235c
Abstract
Crosslinguistic influence in simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) has been claimed to lead to delay and acceleration (Paradis & Genesee 1996). Whilst various studies have demonstrated the existence of delay, the evidence for acceleration is rather limited (cf. Meisel 2007). Furthermore, most studies in this area focused on the acquisition of morphosyntax and syntax-pragmatics; to date, few examine the area of syntax-semantics (but cf. Serratrice et al. 2009, Unsworth 2012). This paper seeks to fill these gaps by investigating whether crosslinguistic influence in the form of acceleration takes place in the interpretation of specific indefinites in sentences with negation by 2L1 Dutch-Italian children.
Previous research has shown that Dutch-speaking 4- to 6-year-old children pass through a stage, where, unlike adults, they treat the scrambled sentence in (1) as ambiguous between a specific (1a) and a non-specific (1b) interpretation (Unsworth et al., 2008).
(1) Ian heeft een kaarsje niet uitgeblazen
a. There is a candle Ian did not blow out (a>not)
b. Ian did not blow out any candle (not>a)
In a recent study, Unsworth (2012) shows that English-Dutch 2L1 children pass through a similar stage and they furthermore restrict (1) to its target specific interpretation within the same timeframe as monolinguals (L1). Here, we examine data from Italian-Dutch 2L1 children. Following Su (2001), we argue that, unlike English, indefinite objects in negative sentences in Italian (2) are unambiguously specific as a result of the same form (‘un/uno/una’) being used for both indefinite and numeral (i.e., ‘one’).
(2) Sandro non ha spento una candelina
‘Sandro did not blow out a candle’
a. There is a candle Sandro did not blow out (a>not)
We hypothesize that at the stage where child Dutch allows (1) to be associated with both specific and non-specific interpretations, and, in Italian, (2) is interpreted specifically, the availability of the specific interpretation in Italian will facilitate its acquisition in the Dutch of Italian-Dutch 2L1 children, i.e., we expect crosslinguistic influence in the form of acceleration.
We first show that (2) is indeed unambiguous by using a (picture) Truth Value Judgment task where sentences like (2) were evaluated in a situation in which Sandro blew out all the candles except one : L1 Italian (4;6-5;11; n=7) children almost always accepted the specific interpretation (92 % (32/35)). Subsequently, the same task was used in both languages with 2L1 Dutch-Italian (4;4-6;1; n=13) and in Dutch with age-matched L1 (n=13) children. The results, cf. Figure 1, show that: (i) like monolinguals, 2L1 children almost always accepted the specific interpretation in Italian (96 % (62/65); U(20)=35, p=.45); (ii) this was also the case for Dutch (acceptance rate: 97% (63/65)); and (iii) crucially, the 2L1 children accepted the specific reading significantly more often than the age-matched monolinguals (cf. 48% (34/65); U(26)=30, p=.001).
The data demonstrate crosslinguistic influence in the area of syntax-semantics and are in line with previous work on scope preferences in heritage learners (Lee et al. 2010; O’Grady et al. 2011); however, in contrast to this work, our data show acceleration rather than delay.