Segmentation and temporal structuring of events in early Spanish-Swedish bilinguals

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine patterns of segmentation and temporal structuring of events in early bilinguals. The participant group consists of 25 L1 Spanish — L2 Swedish adult bilinguals residing in Sweden, with ages of L2 acquisition ranging from 1 to 11 years. There were 15 native speakers of Swedish and 15 native speakers of Spanish engaged as monolingual controls. The participants provided online-retellings in both languages of an excerpt from the film Modern Times. The bilinguals’ L1 and L2 retellings were compared with those of the monolingual speakers of the respective languages. The results indicated that the bilinguals resorted to the same event segmentation strategies in both L1 and L2, opting for an intermediate degree of event resolution. This behavior fell in between the monolingual Spanish high degree of resolution and the monolingual Swedish low degree of resolution. As for temporal structuring patterns, the results showed that the bilinguals in their L2 converged with the Swedish monolingual controls, linking the events by means of anaphoric adverbials (i.e., ‘ x then y’). The bilinguals also converged with the Spanish-speaking controls in their L1 perspectivation patterns, as both groups left the temporal relation between the events to be inferred and focused on ongoingness (i.e., now x, now y). These findings are discussed in terms of convergence and co-existence of conceptual patterns (Pavlenko, 1999, 2008).