Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T21:13:06.155Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bilingual acquisition of reference: The role of language experience, executive functions and cross-linguistic effects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2021

Jacopo Torregrossa ,
Maria Andreou ,
Christiane Bongartz  and
Ianthi Maria Tsimpli
Jacopo Torregrossa*
Affiliation:
Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Maria Andreou
Affiliation:
University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Christiane Bongartz
Affiliation:
University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Ianthi Maria Tsimpli
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England
*
Address for correspondence: Jacopo Torregrossa, E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The present study aims to understand which factors contribute to different patterns of use of referring expressions by bilingual children, by considering the triangulation between language experience and proficiency, executive functions and cross-linguistic effects. We analyze reference use in Greek in the context of a narrative elicitation task as performed by 125 children of different language combinations, including Greek–Albanian, Greek–English and Greek–German. We calculate, for each child, an index of language experience that combines a proficiency measure with background questionnaire information. After identifying the occurrences of underinformative (underspecified) and overinformative (overspecified) referring expressions in the production of each child, we investigate to what extent each pattern of reference use is affected by language experience, cross-linguistic effects and executive functions. The study aims to shed some new light on the nature of overspecification and underspecification in bilingual reference production and, more in general, to model variation in reference use among bilingual children.

Keywords

bilingual reference productionlanguage dominanceexecutive functionscross-linguistic effectsover- and underspecification
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , August 2021 , pp. 694 - 706
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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

Almor, A (1999) Noun-phrase anaphora and focus: The informational load hypothesis. Psychological Review 106, 748–765.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Almor, A, Kempler, D, MacDonald, MC, Andersen, ES and Tyler, LKT (1999) Why do Alzheimer's patients have difficulty with pronouns? Working memory, semantics, and pronouns in Alzheimer's disease. Brain and Language 67, 202–227.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ariel, M (1990) Accessing NP antecedents. London, Routledge.Google Scholar
Arnold, JE (2010) How speakers refer: The role of accessibility. Language and Linguistics Compass 4, 187–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, DM, Maechler, M and Bolker, B (2012) lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using S4 classes. R package version 0.999999-0.Google Scholar
Belletti, A, Bennati, E and 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
Bettcher, BM, Mungas, D, Patel, N, Elofson, J, Dutt, S, Wynn, M, Watson, CL, Stephens, M, Walsh, CM and Kramer, JH (2016) Neuroanatomical substrates of executive functions: Beyond prefrontal structures, Neuropsychologia 85, 100–109.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E and Majumder, S (1998) The relationship between bilingualism and the development of cognitive processes in problem-solving, Applied Psycholinguistics 19, 69–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blom, E, Paradis, J and Duncan, TS (2012) Effects of input properties, vocabulary size, and L1 on the development of third person singular–s in child L2 English, Language Learning 62, 965–994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bongartz, CM and Torregrossa, J (2020) The effects of balanced biliteracy on Greek–German bilingual children's secondary discourse ability, Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 23, 948–963.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burzio, L (1998) Anaphora and soft constraints. In Barbosa, P, Fox, D, Hagstrom, P, McGinnis, M and Pesetsky, D (eds), Is the best good enough? Optimality and competition in syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 93–114.Google Scholar
Cardinaletti, A and Starke, M (1999) The Typology of Structural Deficiency: A Case Study of the Three Classes of Pronouns. In van Riemsdijk, H (ed.), Clitics in the Languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, pp. 145–233.Google Scholar
Carroll, S (2017) Explaining bilingual learning outcomes in terms of exposure and input, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 20, 37–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chondrogianni, V and Marinis, T (2011) Differential effects of internal and external factors on the development of vocabulary, tense morphology and morpho-syntax in successive bilingual children, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1, 318–345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, JD, Perlstein, WM, Braver, TS, Nystrom, LE, Noll, DC, Jonides, J and Smith, EE (1997) Temporal dynamics of brain activation during a working memory task, Nature 386, 604–608.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Daller, H, van Hout, R and Treffers-Daller, J (2003) Lexical Richness in the Spontaneous Speech of Bilinguals, Applied Linguistics 24, 197–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daller, H, Milton, J and Treffers-Daller, J (eds) (2007) Modelling vocabulary knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Cat, C (2015) The cognitive underpinnings of referential abilities. In Serratrice, L and Allen, SEM (eds), The acquisition of reference. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 263–283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Cat, C, Gusnanto, A and Serratrice, L (2018) Identifying a threshold for the executive function advantage in bilingual children, Studies in Second Language Acquisition 40, 119–151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeKeyser, RM (2007) Practice in Second Language: Perspectives from Applied Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fukumura, K and van Gompel, RPG (2011) The effect of animacy on the choice of referring expression, Language and Cognitive Processes 26, 1472–1504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gagarina, N (2016) Narratives of Russian–German preschool and primary school bilinguals: Rasskaz and Erzaehlung, Applied Psycholinguistics 37, 91–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V and Thomas, E (2009) Bilingual first-language development: Dominant language takeover, threatened minority language take-up, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12, 213–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Georgopoulos, A (2017) Anaphora in the interlanguage of English and Greek learners of L2 Spanish: A study based on the CEDEL2 corpus. Doctoral Dissertation, Universidad de Granada.Google Scholar
Givón, T (1983) Topic Continuity in Discourse: A quantitative cross-language study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosz, B and Sidner, C (1986) Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse, Computational Linguistics 12, 175–204.Google Scholar
Gundel, J, Hedberg, N and Zacharski, R (1993) Cognitive Status and the Form of Referring Expressions in Discourse, Language 69, 274–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hendriks, P (2014) Asymmetries between language production and comprehension. Dordrecht: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hendriks, P (2016) Cognitive Modeling of Individual Variation in Reference Production and Comprehension. Frontiers in Psychology 7, 506–526.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hendriks, P, Koster, C and Hoeks, JCJ (2014) Referential choice across the lifespan: why children and elderly adults produce ambiguous pronouns, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 29, 391–407.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hsin, L, Legendre, G and Omaki, A (2013) Priming cross-linguistic interference in Spanish-English bilingual children. In Baiz, S, Goldman, N and Hawkes, R (eds), BUCDL 37: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville: Cascadilla Press, pp. 165–177.Google Scholar
Jaeggi, SM, Buschkuehl, M, Perrig, WJ and Meier, B (2010) The concurrent validity of the N-back task as a working memory measure, Memory 18, pp. 394–412.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kabashi, B (2007) Pronominal clitics and valency in Albanian: A computational linguistics perspective and modelling within the LAG-Framework. In Herbst, T and Götz-Votteler, K (eds), Valency: Theoretical, Descriptive and Cognitive Issues. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kapia, E and Kananaj, A (2013) The Albanian Vocabulary Instrument. Tiranë: Center for Albanian Studies, Institute for Linguistics and Literature.Google Scholar
Kibrik, A (2011) Reference in Discourse, Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, J and Just, MA (1991) Individual differences in syntactic processing: The role of working memory, Journal of Memory and Language 30, 580–602.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirchner, WK (1958) Age differences in short-term retention of rapidly changing information. Journal of experimental psychology 55, 352–358.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kupisch, T and Rothman, J (2016) Terminology matters! Why difference is not incompleteness and how early child bilinguals are heritage speakers, International Journal of Bilingualism 22, 564–582.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leclercq, P and Lenart, E (2013) Discourse cohesion and accessibility of referents in oral narratives: A comparison of L1 and L2 acquisition of French and English, Discours 12, 3–31.Google Scholar
Lenth, R (2020) emmeans: Estimated marginal means, aka least-squares means. R Package Version 1.4.6. https://cran.r-project.org/packages/emmeans/index.htmlGoogle Scholar
Lewis, RL and Vasishth, S (2005) An Activation-Based Model of Sentence Processing as Skilled Memory Retrieval, Cognitive Science 29, 375–419.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lewis, RL, Vasishth, S and Van Dyke, JA (2006) Computational principles of working memory in sentence comprehension, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10, 447–454.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liceras, JM, Fernández Fuertes, R and Alba de la Fuente, A (2012) Overt subjects and copula omission in the Spanish and the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: On the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence, First Language 32, 88–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lozano, C (2016) Pragmatic Principles in Anaphora Resolution at the Syntax-Discourse Interface: Advanced English Learners of Spanish in the CEDEL2 Corpus. In Alonso-Ramos, M (ed), Spanish Learner Corpus Research: State of the Art and Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 236–265.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B (2000) The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, 3rd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Mattheoudakis, M, Chatzidaki, A, Maligkoudi, C and Agathopoulou, E (2016) Family and school language input: Their role in bilingual children's vocabulary development, Journal of Applied Linguistics 31, 49–69.Google Scholar
McKee, C and McDaniel, D (2001) Resumptive Pronouns in English Relative Clauses, Language Acquisition 9, 113–156.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miyake, A, Friedman, NP, Emerson, MJ, Witzki, AH, Howerter, A and Wager, TD (2000) The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: A latent variable analysis, Cognitive Psychology 41, 49–100.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Montrul, S (2004) Subject and object expression in Spanish heritage speakers: A case of morpho-syntactic convergence, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 7, 125–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S (2015) Dominance and proficiency in early and late bilingualism. In Silva-Corvalán, C and Treffers-Daller, J (eds), Language Dominance in Bilinguals: Issues of Measurement and Operationalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15–35.Google Scholar
Mora, JC and Nadeu, M (2012) L2 effects on the perception and production of a native vowel contrast in early bilinguals, International Journal of Bilingualism 16, 484–500.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, N and Hulk, A (2001) Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paap, KR, Johnson, HA and Sawi, O (2014) Are bilingual advantages dependent upon specific tasks or specific bilingual experiences? Journal of Cognitive Psychology 26, 615–639.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J (2010) Bilingual children's acquisition of English verb morphology: Effects of language exposure, structure complexity, and task type, Language Learning 60, 651–680.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J (2011) Individual differences in child English second language acquisition. Comparing child-internal and child-external factors, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1, 213–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J and Navarro, S (2003) Subject realization and crosslinguistic interference in the bilingual acquisition of Spanish and English: What is the role of the input? Journal of Child Language 30, 371–393.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Petermann, F, Metz, D and Fröhlich, LP (2010) SET 5-10. Sprachstandserhebung für Kinder im Alter von 5-10 Jahren. Göttingen et al.: Hochgrefe.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2012) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.Google Scholar
Renfrew, C (1995) Word Finding Vocabulary Test. 4th Edition. Oxon: Winslow.Google Scholar
Rinke, E, Flores, C and Barbosa, P (2018) Null objects in the spontaneous speech of monolingual and bilingual speakers of European Portuguese, Probus 30, 93–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryan, J (2015) Overexplicit Referent Tracking in L2 English: Strategy, Avoidance, or Myth? Language Learning 65, 824–859.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanford, AJ and Garrod, SC (1981) Understanding written language, New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Schmitt, N (2014) Size and depth of vocabulary knowledge: What the research shows, Language Learning 64, 913–951.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, P, Dubé, RV and Hayward, D (2005) The Edmonton narrative norms instrument (ENNI). Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: University of Alberta. Available online: http://www.rehabresearch.ualberta.ca/enni (accessed on 25 May 2016).Google Scholar
Schumacher, PB, Roberts, L and Järvikivi, J (2016) Agentivity drives real-time pronoun resolution: Evidence from German er and der, Lingua 185, 25–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serratrice, L (2007) Referential cohesion in the narratives of bilingual English-Italian children and monolingual peers, Journal of Pragmatics 39, 1058–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serratrice, L and De Cat, C (2019) Individual differences in the production of referential expressions: The effect of language proficiency, language exposure and executive function in bilingual and monolingual children, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 23(2), 371–386.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serratrice, L and Hervé, C (2015) Referential expressions in bilingual acquisition. In Serratrice, L and Allen, SEM (eds), The Acquisition of Reference. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 311–333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serratrice, L, Sorace, A, Filiaci, F and Baldo, M (2011) Pronominal objects in English-Italian and Spanish-Italian bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics 33, 725–751.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serratrice, L, Sorace, A and Paoli, S (2004) Crosslinguistic influence at the syntax–pragmatics interface: Subjects and objects in English–Italian bilingual and monolingual acquisition, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 7, 183–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, C (2014) Bilingual Language Acquisition: Spanish and English in the first six years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorace, A (2011) Cognitive advantages in bilingualism: Is there a ‘bilingual paradox’? In Valore, P (ed.), Multilingualism. Language, Power and Knowledge. Pisa: Edistudio, pp. 335–358.Google Scholar
Sorace, A and Serratrice, L (2009) Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development: Beyond structural overlap, International Journal of Bilingualism 13, 195–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorace, A, Serratrice, L, Filiaci, F and Baldo, M (2009) Discourse conditions on subject pronoun realization: Testing the linguistic intuitions of older bilingual children, Lingua, 119, 460–477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clair-Thompson, St, & Gathercole, HL, S. (2006) Executive functions and achievements in school: Shifting, updating, inhibition, and working memory, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 59, 745–759.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thordardottir, E (2011) The relationship between bilingual exposure and vocabulary development, International Journal of Bilingualism 15, 426–445.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torregrossa, J (2017) The role of executive functions in the acquisition of reference: The production of demonstrative pronouns by German monolingual children. In Choi, J, Dimirdache, H, Lungu, O and Voeltzel, L (eds), Language Acquisition at the Interfaces: Proceedings of GALA (Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition) 2015. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 318–331.Google Scholar
Torregrossa, J, Andreou, M and Bongartz, C (2020) Variation in the use and interpretation of null subjects: A view from Greek and Italian, Glossa 5, 95. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1011CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torregrossa, J and Bongartz, CM (2018) Teasing Apart the Effects of Dominance, Transfer, and Processing in Reference Production by German–Italian Bilingual Adolescents, Languages 3, 36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torregrossa, J, Bongartz, CM and Tsimpli, IM (2015) Testing accessibility: A cross-linguistic comparison of the syntax of referring expressions. In Proceedings of the 89th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torregrossa, J, Bongartz, CM and Tsimpli, IM (2019) Bilingual reference production. A cognitive-computational account, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9, 569–599.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Treffers-Daller, J (2019) What defines language dominance in bilinguals? Annual Review of Linguistics 5, 375–393.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trenkic, D, Mirkovic, J and Altmann, G (2014) Real-time grammar processing by native and non-native speakers: Constructions unique to the second language, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 17, 237–257.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tsimpli, IM (2014) Early, late or very late? Timing acquisition and bilingualism, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 4, 283–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tsimpli, IM and Sorace, A (2006) Differentiating interfaces: L2 performance in syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse phenomena. In D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia and Zaller, C, BUCLD 30: Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 653–664. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, IM, Sorace, A, Heycock, C and 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
Ullman, MT (2001) The neural basis of lexicon and grammar in first and second language: The declarative/procedural model, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4(2), 105–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Unsworth, S (2013) Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 16, 86–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Unsworth, S (2015) Amount of exposure as a proxy for dominance in bilingual language acquisition. In Silva-Corvalán, C and Treffers-Daller, J (eds.), Language Dominance in Bilinguals: Issues of Measurement and Operationalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 156–173.Google Scholar
Vega, C and Fernandez, M (2011) Errors on the WCST correlate with language proficiency scores in Spanish-English bilingual children, Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 26, 158–164.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vogindroukas, I, Protopapas, A and Sideridis, G (2009) Experiment on the Expressive Vocabulary (Greek version of Renfrew Word Finding Vocabulary Test). Chania: Glafki.Google Scholar
Weber, R, Johnson, A, Riccio, C and Liew, J (2016) Balanced bilingualism and executive functioning in children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19, 425–431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winter, B (2013) Linear models and linear mixed effects models in R with linguistic applications. arXiv: 1308.5499.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Torregrossa et al. supplementary material

Torregrossa et al. supplementary material

Download Torregrossa et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 651 KB