The impact of typological factors in monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition

Abstract

The present study compares (1) monolingual English vs. French adults and children and (2) simultaneous French-English bilingual children who describe caused motion events. The results concerning L1 speakers showed developmental progressions in both languages, e.g., utterance complexity increases with age. However, response patterns differed considerably across languages in that responses were denser and more compact in English than in French. The results concerning bilingual children showed unidirectional crosslinguistic interactions. Responses elicited in English paralleled monolingual developmental patterns, whereas bilinguals' French productions differed from those of monolingual French peers. The findings suggest that bilingual children transfer lexicalisation patterns from one of their languages to the other when the former provides more transparent means of achieving high semantic density.

Cognitive restructuring in the multilingual mind: language-specific effects on processing efficiency of caused motion events in Cantonese–English–Japanese speakers

“…With respect to L2 acquisition, some studies have demonstrated that bilinguals or L2 learners with typologically different languages may transfer L1-based lexicalization patterns into an L2 (Cadierno & Ruiz, 2006; Daller et al, 2011; Ochsenbauer & Engemann, 2011). However, other studies report that L2 learners are able to restructure their L1-based lexicalization patterns when describing motion events with an L2 (Ji & Hohenstein, 2014).…”

Transfer Phenomena in Bilingual Language Acquisition: The Case of Caused-Motion Constructions

“…In this context, studies on the expression of motion events have often emphasized the influence of language-independent general cognitive factors, such as the increasing processing capacities of children, which in turn impact the length and complexity of utterances (Ochsenbauer and Engemann 2011). Along with this, increasing vocabulary and discourse becoming more organized are decisive (Hickmann et al 2018).…”

“…The investigation of the verbalization of caused-motion events in monolingual and bilingual speakers has a long tradition. Using a framework by Talmy (1985), which cannot be further discussed here, studies have focused on the semantic contents of components expressed during the verbalization of motion events-more specifically, the verb and the directional phrase-in both monolinguals and bilinguals (Ochsenbauer and Engemann 2011;Hickmann et al 2018). Although idiosyncratic uses were not the focus of these studies, results in English-French and German-French children show that productions sometimes consist of structures that did not correspond to the monolingual use of language (Engemann 2013;Hickmann et al 2018).…”

Path Under Construction: Challenges Beyond S-Framed Motion Event Construal in L2 German

“…These were semantically and syntactically coded [with respect to verb semantics (manner, non-manner), spatial relation (e.g., IN, OUT, ACROSS), path-and ground-encoding devices (e.g., adverbs, particles, prepositional phrases), etc] 6 . We analyzed all clauses describing motion events, not only, for instance, the semantically richest clause for each event/stimulus (as, e.g., Ji et al, 2011;Ochsenbauer and Engemann, 2011;Harr and Hickmann, 2016). For the majority of the stimuli (except for the video clip descriptions), more than one sentence/clause of the event type motion were thus possibly analyzed with respect to information focus, information locus, information density, usage patterns, and error patterns.…”