Refine
Document Type
- Article (3)
Language
- English (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
Keywords
- Discourse (1)
- German-Italian bilinguals (1)
- Position of Antecedent strategy (1)
- Sentence repetition task (1)
- Syntactic complexity (1)
- bilingual (1)
- biliteracy (1)
- error explanation (1)
- grammaticality judgment (1)
- metalinguistic awareness (1)
Institute
We aim to understand whether Greek and Italian, two null subject languages, differ in the use and interpretation of null subjects, based on evidence from both a production and a comprehension experiment. The results of the two experiments show that the two languages differ in the extent to which they comply with the Position of Antecedent Strategy as formulated by Carminati (2002). In order to account for this difference, we introduce a principle which defines prominence of sentence constituents in terms of hierarchical height, elaborating on a recent proposal by Rizzi (2018). Then we show that the prominence of subject and object constituents in Greek and Italian reflects word-order differences between the two languages (Roussou & Tsimpli 2006). In more general terms, this paper argues in favour of a multi-factorial approach to reference interpretation, in that syntactic factors interact with discourse factors, leading to a gradient variety of reference possibilities.
Most studies on bilingual children's metalinguistic awareness assess metalinguistic awareness using monolingual tasks. This may not reflect how a bilingual's languages dynamically interact with each other in creating metalinguistic representations. We tested 33 Greek–Italian bilingual children (8–11 years) for metalinguistic awareness using acceptability-rating tasks in which they had to judge and explain grammatical errors. The tasks were in monolingual and bilingual modes in order to show how far metalinguistic awareness in Italian benefited from the activation of Greek. The participants exhibited better metalinguistic awareness abilities in Italian in the bilingual acceptability-rating task in which Greek was activated. The benefits of the bilingual mode were visible in the judgment and explanation of errors and were modulated by syntactic processing abilities in Italian, length of exposure to Italian, type of structure, and age. The results show that metalinguistic awareness can be shared across languages. We discuss the pedagogical implications of our findings.
Sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) have been extensively used as measures of bilinguals’ language abilities. Most studies relied on SRTs in which the target sentences were not connected to each other. However, participants’ performance may differ if these sentences are embedded in discourse, since discourse provides participants with additional cues for sentence comprehension and interpretation. For the present study, we designed a discourse-based SRT, whereby the target sentences were connected to each other in a story. We examined the effect of discourse on bilinguals’ performance in the SRT and investigated whether this effect varied based on the language of administration, bilinguals’ dominance score and type of target structure. We tested 32 Italian-German bilingual children (7–12 years) living in Germany with two SRTs in each language, one with discourse and one without discourse. Participants showed a better performance in the SRTs with discourse, especially in the heritage language (Italian). The effect of discourse was visible across the board with all target structures. On the whole, SRTs with discourse seem to reduce the processing costs associated with lexical retrieval and shifts in scenarios, thus tapping more directly into children's processing abilities, compared to more traditional SRTs. The results are discussed in terms of ecological validity of different assessment instruments.