(In)vulnerable agreement in incomplete bilingual L1 learners

Abstract

This study investigates morphological vulnerability in incomplete bilingual L1 acquisition. It examines the production of L1 inflections by L2-dominant bilingual children, with the aim of exploring causes of difficulty in agreement marking. Spontaneous data (18 hours) from six Hungarian-English bilingual children, aged seven to nine, is used to compare the production of possessive inflections and verbal inflections, which are expressed by identical surface morphology in Hungarian. Drawing on recent analysis of Hungarian (Alberti, 1995;Szabolcsi, 1994), the paper asks where and why agreement morphology is susceptible to variability in bilingual children's weaker L1. Results indicate significant differences in the accuracy of agreement morphology. Inflections are almost error-free in possessive nominals and subject-verb agreement. However, they are frequently omitted in possessive be-clauses, which can be attributed to a combination of factors: (i) influence of semantic-syntactic properties of English have on Hungarian be possessive construction (transfer from L2); (ii) difficulty with long-distance agreement in Hungarian be-possessives (structural complexity of L1); and (iii) influence of Hungarian existential and locative constructions on possessive-be (ambiguity in L1). It is argued that morphological variability is selective, and the main source of vulnerability is the syntax-semantics interface where the weaker L1 is most susceptible to L2 influence.

Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics

“…They do better on concatenative processes that affix morphemes to stems than on non-concatenative processes that require decomposing the stem into smaller prosodic units. This implies that concatenative and non-concatenative derivations are different with regard to their degrees of acquisition difficulty and vulnerability to attrition, a finding that is consistent with research on the acquisition of Arabic morphology (Omar 1973, Ravid andFarah 1999) In the nominal domain, heritage speakers exhibit errors with gender agreement in Russian, Spanish and Swedish (Håkansson 1995, Montrul et al 2008, Polinsky 2008b, definiteness agreement in Swedish and Hungarian (Håkansson 1995, Bolonyai 2007, case marking in Russian and Korean (Polinsky 1997, 2008a, b, Song et al 1997, and concord in Arabic (Albirini et al in press). Similar patterns of erosion are attested in the verbal domain, including agreement in Russian (Polinsky 1997(Polinsky , 2006, lexical aspect in Russian (Pereltsvaig 2005;Polinsky 1997Polinsky , 2006Polinsky , 2011, grammatical aspect in Spanish and Hungarian (Montrul 2002, Fenyvesi 2000, de Groot 2005, mood in Spanish, Russian, and Hungarian (Lynch 1999, Montrul 2009, Silva-Corvalán 1994, Polinsky 1997, Fenyvesi 2000, and inflected infinitives in Brazilian Portuguese (Rothman 2007).…”

Language contact in the Polish-American community in Chicago

“…The findings presented in the article confirm the findings of research done on HP in the context of Swedish bilinguals (Laskowski, 2009), as similar observations in nominal morphology have been made. Moreover, the tendency to use one oblique case supports the findings observed elsewhere (Polinsky & Kagan, 2007) and overall tendencies of inflectional morphology to be vulnerable to incomplete acquisition and attrition (Anderson, 1999;Bolonyai, 2007;Polinsky, 2008). Also, the project presents similar observations about the use of aspectual verb forms and lack of agreement within a noun phrase to those made in the Spanish context (Montrul, 2009;Muller Gathercole, 2002).…”

Review article: Second language acquisition welcomes the heritage language learner: opportunities of a new field

“…It is an open question, therefore, as to whether the transfer effects in these two situations are comparable: is L1 influence in adult L2 learners (late bilinguals) similar to L2 influence in early bilinguals? In short, although there is some basic research that systematically compares L2 learners and heritage speakers -as well as research focusing on the systematic nature of incompletely acquired L1 grammatical systems in children and adults (Silva-Corvalán, 1994;Håkansson, 1995;Song et al, 1997;Anderson, 1999;Montrul, 2002;2004;Kondo-Brown, 2005;Polinsky, 2006;2008;Bolonyai, 2007) -this trend should continue. The findings from these research programs have much bearing on our understanding of the role of age on language acquisition and loss more generally, and they are crucial to inform linguistic theory and the heritage language teaching profession.…”