Exploring the source of differences and similarities in L1 attrition and heritage speaker competence: Evidence from pronominal resolution

Several studies of different bilingual groups including L2 learners, child bilinguals, heritage speakers and L1 attriters reveal similar performance on syntax-discourse interface properties such as anaphora resolution (Sorace, 2011 and references therein). Specifically, bilinguals seem to allow more optionality in the interpretation of overt subject pronouns in null subject languages, such as Greek, Italian and Spanish while the interpretation of null subject pronouns is indistinguishable from monolingual natives. Nevertheless, there is some evidence pointing to bilingualism effects on the interpretation of null subject pronouns too in heritage speakers' grammars (Montrul, 2004) due to some form of 'arrested' development in this group of bilinguals. The present study seeks to investigate similarities and differences between two Greek-Swedish bilingual groups, heritage speakers and L1 attriters, in anaphora resolution of null and overt subject pronouns in Greek using a self-paced listening with a sentence-picture matching decision task at the end of each sentence. The two groups differ in crucial ways: heritage speakers were simultaneous or early bilinguals while the L1 attriters were adult learners of the second language, Swedish. Our findings reveal differences from monolingual preferences in the interpretation of the overt pronoun for both heritage and attrited speakers while the differences attested between the two groups in the interpretation of null subject pronouns affect only response times with heritage being faster than attrited speakers. We argue that our results do not support an age of onset or differential input effects on bilingual performance in pronoun resolution

\u3cem\u3eMedianeras/Sidewalls\u3c/em\u3e: A Film by Gustavo Taretto

This article is part of dossier Architects on Film: Architects on the Fram

An Experimental Investigation of the Antecedent Preferences of Hebrew Subject Pronouns

A magnitude estimation study was conducted in order to investigate the likelihood of different pronominal forms in Hebrew to be resolved to different antecedents. Subjects were presented with sentences such as ”Dana wrote Nina when φ stayed in the U.S.” and were asked to rate the likelihood of a following sentence resolving the anaphor, e.g. ”Dana stayed in the U.S.”. The results showed that null and demonstrative pronouns have a significant preference for subject and object antecedents, respectively, a result in keeping with previous work (by Carminati, 2002; Bosch et al., 2006, among others). The overt pronoun exhibited a significant bias only when used in logophors, where it preferred a subject antecedent over an object one. This stands in contrast to what Carminati (2002) and Sorace and Filiaci (2006) have found in Italian whereby the object antecedent was preferred in these cases. The results are discussed in light of Hebrew’s special pro-drop pattern, alongside the implications of the cross-linguistic variance attested for.