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

Abstract

AbstractThe 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.