Language Dominance Affects Bilingual Performance and Processing Outcomes in Adulthood.

Eloi Puig-Mayenco,Jason Rothman,David Miller,Fatih Bayram,Susagna Tubau,Ian Cunnings

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01199

Abstract

This study examines the role of language dominance (LD) on linguistic competence outcomes in two types of early bilinguals: (i) child L2 learners of Catalan (L1 Spanish-L2 Catalan and, (ii) child Spanish L2 learners (L1 Catalan-L2 Spanish). Most child L2 studies typically focus on the development of the languages during childhood and either focus on L1 development or L2 development. Typically, these child L2 learners are immersed in the second language. We capitalize on the unique situation in Catalonia, testing the Spanish and Catalan of both sets of bilinguals, where dominance in either Spanish or Catalan is possible. We examine the co-occurrence of Sentential Negation (SN) with a Negative Concord Item (NCI) in pre-verbal position (Catalan only) and Differential Object Marking (DOM) (Spanish only). The results show that remaining dominant in the L1 contributes to the maintenance of target-like behavior in the language.

Highlights

A large body of studies involving early childhood bilinguals examine the development of linguistic competence during the acquisition process itself, often focusing on how bilingual acquisition is qualitatively similar or different to monolinguals during the developmental period of language learning
The results show that both groups are sensitive to the morphosyntactic violation of pre-verbal Negative Concord Item (NCI) co-occurring with Sentential Negation in Spanish
As there is a significant amount of data to be considered, we begin with a brief overview of the most interesting results

Summary

Introduction

A large body of studies involving early childhood bilinguals examine the development of linguistic competence during the acquisition process itself, often focusing on how bilingual acquisition is qualitatively similar or different to monolinguals during the developmental period of language learning (see Meisel, 2011; Serratrice, 2013; Nicoladis, 2018 for a review). Studies concerned with adult second language acquisition or first language attrition largely focus on similar processes; they do so with inherently different contexts concerning age of onset and other deterministic variables (see Rothman and Slabakova, 2017; White, 2018; Wulff and Ellis, 2018; Yilmaz and Schmid, 2018 for updated reviews from various paradigmatic approaches). HSs are a subtype of Language Dominance Effects on Bilinguals native speaker (Rothman and Treffers-Daller, 2014) This is interesting given that studies generally reveal that adult HS grammars reflect both dominance in the majority language (i.e., whether a simultaneous L1 or child L2 for the HS) and degrees of non-monolingual-like variability in the heritage L1 (see Montrul, 2008, 2016; Benmamoun et al, 2013)

Methods

Results

Conclusion