Heritage Portuguese and Heritage Polish in Contact with German: More Evidence on the Production of Objects

Rinke, Esther; Flores, Cristina; Sopata, Aldona

doi:10.3390/languages4030053

Cited by 12 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…It should be noted that these factors are not always easy to tease apart. As a case in point,Rinke et al (2019) found in their study of clitics and null objects in German-Portuguese and German-Polish children that input at home, AoO of the L2 German, CA, and HL instruction were highly correlated.…”

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confidence: 94%

Does Timing in Acquisition Modulate Heritage Children’s Language Abilities? Evidence from the Greek LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task

Makrodimitris

Schulz

2021

Languages

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Recent proposals suggest that timing in acquisition, i.e., the age at which a phenomenon is mastered by monolingual children, influences acquisition of the L2, interacting with age of onset of bilingualism and amount of L2 input. Here, we examine whether timing affects acquisition of the bilingual child’s heritage language, possibly modulating the effects of environmental and child-internal factors. The performance of 6- to 12-year-old Greek heritage children residing in Germany (age of onset of German: 0–4 years) was assessed across a range of nine syntactic structures via the Greek LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) Sentence Repetition Task. Based on previous studies on monolingual Greek, the structures were classified as “early” (main clauses (SVO), coordination, clitics, complement clauses, sentential negation, non-referential wh-questions) or as “late” (referential wh-questions, relatives, adverbial clauses). Current family use of Greek and formal instruction in Greek (environmental), chronological age, and age of onset of German (child-internal) were assessed via the Questionnaire for Parents of Bilingual Children (PABIQ); short-term memory (child-internal) was measured via forward digit recall. Children’s scores were generally higher for early than for late acquired structures. Performance on the three early structures with the highest scores was predicted by the amount of current family use of Greek. Performance on the three late structures was additionally predicted by forward digit recall, indicating that higher short-term memory capacity is beneficial for correctly reconstructing structurally complex sentences. We suggest that the understanding of heritage language development and the role of child-internal and environmental factors will benefit from a consideration of timing in the acquisition of the different structures.

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confidence: 94%

Does Timing in Acquisition Modulate Heritage Children’s Language Abilities? Evidence from the Greek LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task

Makrodimitris

Schulz

2021

Languages

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“…The syntactic domain, however, is clearly an understudied area. Studies have been mostly concerned with phenomena from the syntax/pragmatics interface, such as null subjects (Brehmer et al 2019), null objects (Rinke et al 2019) or definiteness marking (Błaszczyk 2013). With regard to word order, there has been no comprehensive study on heritage Polish in Germany at all.…”

Section: Word Order In Heritage Varieties Of Polish and Other Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word Order in Complex Verb Phrases in Heritage Polish Spoken in Germany

Brehmer

Sopata

2021

Languages

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This paper deals with word order in complex verb phrases consisting of auxiliaries and infinitive complements in heritage Polish. In Polish, infinitive complements normally follow auxiliaries, but discontinuous structures occur if required by the information structure. We investigate the occurrence and evaluation of adjacent and discontinuous word order patterns in relation to (a) the chronological age at testing and (b) the age of onset of the acquisition of the majority language, German. Therefore, we distinguish between simultaneous bilinguals (2L1, n = 61), early sequential bilinguals (cL2, n = 41) and an age-matched monolingual control group (ML, n = 50). The data consist of elicited oral narratives as well as acceptability judgments. We found that both 2L1 and cL2 bilinguals differ from the ML, but the difference depends on the age at testing and the type of data (oral production or evaluation). While 2L1 bilinguals show a u-curve development, which is shaped by the interplay of delayed acquisition in childhood and attrition in early adulthood, cL2 bilinguals started to prefer discontinuous structures rather early. Only in adulthood do both groups converge and exhibit an overuse and over-acceptance of discontinuous structures compared to the ML, which is due to cross-linguistic influence from German. However, language-internal factors (such as clause structure) also turned out to impact the distribution of adjacent and discontinuous structures in heritage (and monolingual) Polish.

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“…The choice between referential expressions depends on the degree of accessibility of the referent (e.g. Ariel, 1991) and the referential properties of the referent (Rinke, Flores, & Sopata, 2019). In Polish, a typical null subject language, in ambiguous contexts, the null pronoun refers to an antecedent that is the topic of the main clause, whereas the overt pronoun tends to select a nonsubject antecedent (McShane, 2009;Pilarski, 2013).…”

Section: Null Arguments In German and Polishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous and early sequential acquisition: Null subjects and null objects in Polish-German bilingualism

Sopata

Długosz

Brehmer

et al. 2021

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The topic of cross-linguistic influence regarding the overt or null expression of arguments has been frequently considered regarding bilinguals acquiring language pairs in which the null option is licensed by one and not both of the two languages. The goal of this study is to investigate whether simultaneous and sequential bilinguals differ from monolinguals in the case of the acquisition of Polish and German; that is, languages which both license null subjects and null objects, but in which the nature of the null arguments clearly differs. We focus on the acquisition of null arguments as silent but syntactically active bundles of features. Design/methodology/approach: We compare the use of null subjects and null objects by 72 bilingual and 45 monolingual children in experimental setting: acceptability judgement and sentence repetition. Data and analysis: The distribution of null arguments in production and judgement data of simultaneous and early sequential bilinguals was compared to the data of monolinguals. Findings/conclusions: The study has revealed that early sequential Polish-German bilinguals avoid null subjects in L2 German at an advanced stage of acquisition, even though null subjects are quite frequent in their L1. The slower acquisition of null subjects in early L2 German in comparison to null objects in the case of Polish-German bilinguals demonstrates that the dissimilarity between the null subjects in both languages may lead to the delay effect in the acquisition. The findings suggest that the cross-linguistic influence is due to the increased complexity inherent to the integration of syntactic and pragmatic information in case of null arguments. Originality: Unlike previous studies, we focus on the acquisition of null arguments in a language pair, Polish and German, in which the null option is licensed by both grammars, and in which the nature of the null arguments clearly differ.

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Heritage Portuguese and Heritage Polish in Contact with German: More Evidence on the Production of Objects

Cited by 12 publications

References 28 publications

Does Timing in Acquisition Modulate Heritage Children’s Language Abilities? Evidence from the Greek LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task

Does Timing in Acquisition Modulate Heritage Children’s Language Abilities? Evidence from the Greek LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task

Word Order in Complex Verb Phrases in Heritage Polish Spoken in Germany

Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous and early sequential acquisition: Null subjects and null objects in Polish-German bilingualism

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