Rhetorical question comprehension by Italian–German bilingual children

Abstract

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker’s belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and lexical-syntactic cues. Being childhood learners, children have to acquire the concept of rhetoricity, but being bilinguals, they further need to acquire the different cues marking RhQs in their two languages. We tested 85 bilingual children (aged 6–9 years) with Italian as heritage language (HL) and German as majority language (ML) in both of their languages, using a forced-choice comprehension task. Our results show that RhQ comprehension improves with age in both languages. Bilingual children are able to exploit prosodic and syntactic cues to comprehend RhQs in their ML and HL with a slight advantage in the ML. This advantage could be either an effect of the cues used in the experiments in the two languages or of a higher proficiency in the ML. In addition, our results point to a later acquisition of prosodic rhetorical cues, which has implications for bilingual acquisition of non-canonicity in general.