Bilingualism research group

Speaker: Mattia Zingaretti (University of Edinburgh)

Title: The relationship between second language acquisition and first language change: Discussing data from English learners of Italian

Abstract: Studies investigating first language (L1) change (or ‘attrition’) often focus on changes in one language domain only, disregarding what happens in the second language (L2) - e.g., changes in L1 phonology (De Leeuw et al, 2018), the lexicon (Schmid & Jarvis, 2014) and syntax (Dussias, 2004). The focus is also usually on L1 changes for L2 English speakers - e.g., migrants in Anglophone countries (cf. Schmid, 2002; Tsimpli et al, 2004; Chamorro et al, 2015). My PhD research hence examines  L1-English changes as well as L2-Italian acquisition across language domains - i.e. in the lexicon, syntax and ’interface’ structures (cf. Sorace, 2011), as well as prosody - within the same late bilingual speakers. To further analyse whether L1 changes are only reported in long-term migrants or may also affect language learners early on, this study employs two bilingual populations: a group of British residents in Italy (N=27) and a group of British 4th-year students of Italian at UK universities. In this talk, I present results for lexical retrieval, the interpretation of one of two interface structures (i.e. pronouns), as well as preliminary results for prosodic deaccenting. Taken together, the data seem to suggest that when one of these L1 domains displays changes, L1 changes are not necessarily present in other domains. Moreover, L1 changes do manifest more - albeit not exclusively - in highly-proficient, L2-immersed speakers. To conclude, I discuss the next steps in my research, as well as future directions for further studies.

Keywords: second language acquisition, late bilingualism, first language change, lexical retrieval, interface structures, prosody

References:

• Chamorro, G., Sturt, P., & Sorace, A. (2016). Selectivity in L1 attrition: Differential object marking in Spanish near-native speakers of English. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 45(3), 697-715.• De Leeuw, E., Tusha, A., and Schmid, M. S. (2018). Individual phonological attrition in Albanian-English late bilinguals. Bilingualism, 21, 278–295. doi: 10.1017/S1366728917000025
• Dussias, P. E. (2004). Parsing a first language like a second: the erosion of L1 parsing strategies in Spanish-English Bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism 8(3), 355–371. doi: 10.1177/13670069040080031001• Schmid, M. S. (2002). First language attrition, use and maintenance: The case of German Jews in Anglophone Countries. 10.1075/sibil.24.
• Schmid, M. S., & Jarvis, S. (2014). Lexical access and lexical diversity in first language attrition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17(4), 729-748.
• Sorace, A. (2011). Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilinguals. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 1-33. 10.1075/lab.1.1.01sor.
• Tsimpli, I., Sorace, A., Heycock, C., & Filiaci, F. (2004). First language attrition and syntactic subjects: A study of Greek and Italian near-native speakers of English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 8(3), 257-277.