BilProcess · French-English bilinguals' processing of morphosyntactic structures: the case of cross-linguistic transfer
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-07-01 → 2019-06-30
- EU contribution
- €195,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
French-English bilinguals' processing of morphosyntactic structures: the case of cross-linguistic transfer
In context of bilingualism, language contact leads to occasional interactions between languages, a phenomenon known as cross-linguistic influence (CLI). It is widely attested in simultaneous bilinguals (2L1), i.e. individuals who were first exposed to two languages from infancy, and in second language learners (L2), i.e. individuals who learnt a second or third language after the age of three. The BilProcess project examines the intra- (i.e. sentence processing, implicit vs. explicit knowledge, noun type) and extra-linguistic (i.e. age, language dominance) mechanisms at play on CLI in school-aged bilingual children and adult second language learners. The project focuses on bilinguals’ comprehension and production of determiners (e.g. the, a, an) which are known to be particularly challenging to acquire for monolingual and bilingual speakers of Romance and Germanic languages. However, no consensus exists on the nature of the difficulty of acquiring the features that govern the determiner phrase. French and English are interesting test case as English allows overt and null determiners (the apples vs. apples) when determiners are obligatory in argument position in French (les pommes). The originality of BilProcess is that it sets to test simultaneous bilingual children and French adult learners of English with the same experimental materials in order to assess whether (i) the age of acquisition of the language (as 2L1 or as L2), and (ii) the relative dominance of the language (stronger vs. weaker language) affect CLI during sentence comprehension and production. Moreover, the project is one of the first to also use a combination of offline (i.e. timed) and online (i.e. untimed) measures of school-aged bilingual children’s sentence comprehension and production to examine the impact of their implicit (i.e. intuitive) and explicit (i.e. conscious) linguistic knowledge on their performances in their two languages. This project contributes theoretically and methodologically to the field of bilingual development. The results also provide important insights by highlighting to language teachers and speech pathologists the grammatical features of determiner use that are actually difficult to learn for bilingual children and adult second language learners of English and French.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
One question central to both bilingual first language acquisition (2L1) and second language development (L2) research is to understand the mechanisms that lead to systematic interaction between the languages, i.e. cross-linguistic influence (CLI). To-date, we know that bilinguals’ two languages are continuously co-activated to some extent at the lexicon and sentence level. Bilinguals need to map different syntactic forms, i.e. one or more for each language, onto the same discourse function, which occasionally leads to the entrenchment of the non-targetlike form. Yet, little is known about how the age of acquisition (2L1 vs. L2) and language dominance (expressive abilities, language exposure) affect the processing mechanisms governing this phenomenon. This project focuses on an aspect of morphosyntactic development (the article system) known to be particularly challenging for both bilingual children and adults. It adopts a unique comparative approach to investigate whether simultaneous French-English bilingual children’s and L2 adult bilinguals’ sentence comprehension is affected by the parallel activation of the article system in specific and generic contexts in two studies using the self-paced moving window method. French is a very restrictive language and requires the projection of a determiner in argument position. In contrast, English allows bare mass nouns and bare plural nouns in non-specific and generic contexts. These cross-linguistic differences will allow us to test (i) whether the co-activation of distinct morphosyntactic forms (article system) depending on the semantic context (specific vs. generic) leads to language interference in French-English bilinguals’ comprehension of sentence structure; (ii) the role of language exposure vs. productive measures of the relative language dominance on the direction and magnitude of cross-linguistic transfers; (iii) to what extent this phenomenon operates differently depending on the age of language acquisition.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX · ColchesterCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union