Bilingualism research group

Speaker: Maki Kubota (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)

Title: Heritage-bilingual Linguistic Proficiency in their Native Grammar: Predictive processing of classifiers in Mandarin Chinese heritage speakers using eye-tracking via internet

Abstract: This study examines how heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese use semantic and/or grammatical cues to predict upcoming classifiers in sentence processing. Past studies have shown that while monolingual speakers of Mandarin Chinese rely more on grammatical information, L2 learners allocate greater weight to semantic cues when encoding prenominal classifiers (Grüter, Lau, & Ling, 2019). Following this, the current project investigates how heritage speakers--who are indeed native speakers of Mandarin Chinese but have different language experience compared to the monolinguals--process classifier information by employing an internet-based eye tracking method. We will also examine what kind of bilingual experience factors (i.e., literacy, exposure, use) may explain increasing monolingual-like performance in heritage speakers. Since this is an ongoing project, we will present the theoretical background, predictions, and methodology in this talk.