TY  - JOUR
A1  - Caloi, Irene
A1  - Belletti, Adriana
A1  - Poletto, Cecilia
T1  - Multilingual competence influences answering strategies in Italian–German speakers
T2  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - The present study aims at analyzing the role of nativeness, the amount of input in L1 acquisition and the multilingual competence in the performance of Italian–German bilingual speakers. We compare novel data from the performance of adult L2 learners (L1: Italian; late L2: German) and that of heritage speakers (heritage language: Italian; majority language: German) to previous data from monolingual speakers of Italian. The comparison deals with the produced word order at the syntax-discourse interface in sentences containing New Information Subjects in answers to questions that prompt the identification of the clausal subject. Overall, adult L2 speakers and heritage speakers perform alike but crucially differently from Italian monolinguals. These data reveal that multilingual proficiency determines an increased variety in the adopted answering strategies; in particular, the German-like strategy is active in Italian. Nativeness alone is thus no guarantee for a homogeneous performance across groups, nor do we find similar patterns of performance in speakers who grew up as monolinguals. Data also show heritage speakers’ sensitivity to verb classes, with answering strategies varying in accordance with the verb argument structure. Participants’ productions reveal an interesting relation in sentences with transitive verbs between subject position (pre-/postverbal) and object form (lexical DP/clitic pronoun).
KW  - heritage language
KW  - L1 attrition
KW  - new information subjects
KW  - interfaces
KW  - optionality
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/46979
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-469795
SN  - 1664-1078
N1  - Copyright © 2018 Caloi, Belletti and Poletto. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
VL  - 9
IS  - Art. 1971
SP  - 1
EP  - 14
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -