Bilingualism research group

Speaker: Chiu-Chou Hao (University of Edinburgh)

Title: The development of non-canonical word order in Mandarin-speaking heritage children

Abstract: In this talk, I will firstly cover a study investigating factors modulating child heritage speakers’ (CHSs) development of (non)-canonical word order.

In the study, twenty 5-to 9- year-old Mandarin CHSs with English as their societal majority language were tested on the comprehension and production of three Mandarin non-canonical word orders: BA actives, BEI passives and simple OSV. Twenty age-matched Mandarin-speaking monolingual children and ten monolingual adults served as controls. Results show effects of structural complexity coupled with (non)-canonical word order, cross-linguistic influence (CLI), and chronological age. Importantly, although CHSs’ performance on BA is largely intact, performance on neither type of OSV structure is age-appropriate. We argue that non-canonical syntactic structures requiring thematic role reversal cause greater difficulties. This is also true in the effect of CLI. Canonical actives are significantly likely to be used following an OSV than an SVO prime in the production. Finally, developmental effect is observed across conditions, indicating that CHSs may take longer to reach monolingual abilities.

I will also introduce a current study that adopts an online comprehension task (self-paced listening task with picture verification) and discuss the results on monolingual adults (serving as baseline).