Bilingualism research group

Speaker: Fernando Martín-Villena (Universidad de Granada)

Title: Investigating L1 morphosyntactic attrition in the production and interpretation of subject pronouns in L1 Spanish-L2 English bilinguals

Abstract: Previous studies on L1 morphosyntactic attrition have mostly focused on L1 changes in bilinguals who have been immersed in the L2 environment for an extended period of time (e.g., over 5 years in Chamorro et al., 2016; Tsimpli et al., 2004). Some authors, however, have contended that L1 attrition occurs within the first ten years of intensive exposure to the L2 (Köpke & Genevska-Hanke, 2018; Köpke & Keijzer, 2019; Schmid, 2019). In addition, very little research has focused on L1 changes in L2 instructed contexts (Cook, 2003). Thus, this study aims to investigate precisely when these changes become apparent in L1 morphosyntax and under which circumstances, as well as to get a better understanding of the (in)stability of the L1 of instructed L2 learners, which is an under-researched phenomenon to date. To fill these gaps, the current study examines the interpretation and production of subject pronouns in L1 Spanish-L2 English bilinguals. In this talk, I will firstly introduce the main tasks (i.e., two oral production tasks, a self-paced reading and an offline picture verification task) and then discuss some preliminary findings from the offline picture verification task adapted from Tsimpli et al. (2004).