Camino, Base y Manera en bilingües de español y sueco: efectos de una segunda lengua en los patrones de expresión del movimiento de una primera lengua

Abstract

This study addresses how Spanish-Swedish early and late bilinguals express motion events in their inherited language or first language: Spanish. We draw on the idea that the habitual conceptualization of events also underlies both L2 usage (Flecken et al., 2014: 51) and L1 usage in bilinguals (Bylund and Jarvis, 2011). Drawing both on studies about second language acquisition and bilingualism we aim to study how the typological patterns for motion encoding of the L2 (a satellite-framed language) may impact on motion encoding in the L1 (a verb-framed language), which the group under study has had but a reduced contact with while growing up in Sweden. Considering this fact and starting off from the assumption that an early age of break with the L1 environment has an impact on how motion events are described in an L1 (Bylund, 2009), we aim to outline the conceptualization of motion events of two groups of bilinguals, in all 31 subjects, and the different sorts of transfer phenomena that may affect their speech. Oral narratives produced by the bilinguals have been compared to two control groups of Spanish and Swedish monolinguals and then been examined in order to analyze their conflation patterns regarding Manner of motion, Path and Ground information. Our results have lead us finally to conclude that both the individuals’ age of second language acquisition and their length of residence in the L2 environment have affected their L1 conceptualization patterns