The effects of balanced biliteracy on Greek-German bilingual children’s secondary discourse ability

Teasing Apart the Effects of Dominance, Transfer, and Processing in Reference Production by German–Italian Bilingual Adolescents

“…The questionnaire consisted of four main modules targeting each of the child's two languages: (i) home language history (amount of exposure before the age of six); (ii) early literacy preparedness (literacy input received prior to schooling); (iii) current literacy (language of schooling and literacy practices outside school, such as writing e-mails or letters, and reading books, comics or newspapers); (iv) current language use (language currently spoken with family members and friends)-cf. Bongartz and Torregrossa 2017;Mattheoudakis et al 2016. For all modules, we assigned each language a score, which was the sum of the scores from the individual answers.…”

“…She interprets overt pronouns as default options that bilinguals use, whenever they fail to integrate syntactic representations with discourse-pragmatic information in real time (Section 1). Within this line of research, Torregrossa et al (2018) show that the production of default forms manifests itself in association with slow processing (i.e., slow lexical retrieval). 4 Finally, it should be pointed out that the omission of clitics by German-Italian bilingual children considered in the above discussion can also be analyzed as depending on processing variables.…”

“…The two languages are equally complex, since both allow for two morphosyntactic exponents of object pronouns, i.e., clitics and overt pronouns in Italian, and nulls and overt pronouns in German. 4 The studies of Sorace (2011) and Torregrossa et al (2018) differ in the assumption of which forms count as default, i.e., overt pronouns for the former, nulls for the latter. The type of form used as default might be an effect of the type of bilingualism taken into account.…”

“…The type of form used as default might be an effect of the type of bilingualism taken into account. The investigation of Torregrossa et al (2018) considers only (relatively) balanced bilingual children.…”

Review: Chini, Marina (a cura di). (2015). Il parlato in (italiano) L2:aspetti pragmatici e prosodici. [(Italian) L2 spoken discourse: Prosodic and pragmatic aspects]. Milano, Italia: Franco Angeli.

“…The articles consider a variety of these factors, ranging from more traditional ones related to the role of L2 proficiency, the type of L1--L2 pair and the intercultural dimension (Bettoni, 2006), to more unexplored ones such as the type of acquisitional context (e.g., spontaneous acquisition vs. guided learning) or literacy practices (see also Bongartz & Torregrossa, 2017 on school biliteracy programs). In addition, the contributions address several methodological issues.…”