International Journal of Bilingualism

This study examines monolingual and multilingual individuals’ discrimination of stop consonants in a language to which they had never been exposed: Korean. If bilingualism leads to increased flexibility in phonological categorization, we may see a broad-based bilingual advantage for phoneme discrimination. Using a Korean phoneme discrimination task, we compared 56 adults in four groups: monolingual English, bilingual Spanish, bilingual Armenian, and trilingual. Findings indicate that Spanish–English bilingual individuals scored no better than English monolinguals, and lower than Armenian–English bilingual individuals. In this case, the advantage from early childhood non-English exposure or current bilingualism was found to be specific only to languages with similar phonemic categories. This supports a narrow first/second language to third language transfer view of phoneme discrimination skills.

One major controversy in the study of code-switching (CS) has been the treatment of structural regularities or patterns. Formal approaches attribute these patterns to syntactic constraints or models that are independent of socio-pragmatic or discourse factors, and hence they fall short of accounting for the variation and diachrony of CS constructions. Functional approaches call for due consideration of inter- and intra-speaker variation and discourse or processing factors, but they do not seem to go very far in pinpointing precisely what factors motivate a particular structural pattern. This paper attempts to integrate these two approaches in examining an emergent pattern in Cantonese–English CS in which postmodifying phrases are attested with English prepositions. The form of the construction may well be captured by some version of the Null Theory, but nonetheless it has little to say about why it is a new and variant pattern in Cantonese–English CS. This paper suggests that the construction is prompted by discourse factors such as salience, information status (i.e. given versus new) and heaviness (of the modifying noun phrase); typological differences (i.e. word order difference between Cantonese and English) and syntactic properties of words (such as prepositions) also have a role to play. Diachronically, this paper suggests that the construction evolves from a continuous English noun phrase with a further switch, which this paper terms “reinsertion”, within this noun phrase. Variants and possible changes of this postmodifier construction are also discussed in the light of “reinsertion” and “schematization”.

Mouthings and mouth gestures are omnipresent in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). Mouthings in NGT are mouth actions that have their origin in spoken Dutch, and are usually time aligned with the signs they co-occur with. Frequently, however, they spread over one or more adjacent signs, so that one mouthing co-occurs with multiple manual signs. We conducted a corpus study to explore how frequently this occurs in NGT and whether there is any sociolinguistic variation in the use of spreading. Further, we looked at the circumstances under which spreading occurs. Answers to these questions may give us insight into the prosodic structure of sign languages. We investigated a sample of the Corpus NGT containing 5929 mouthings by 46 participants. We found that spreading over an adjacent sign is independent of social factors. Further, mouthings that spread are longer than non-spreading mouthings, whether measured in syllables or in milliseconds. By using a relatively large amount of natural data, we succeeded in gaining more insight into the way mouth actions are utilised in sign languages.

This was a cross-sectional study of storytelling development in French–English bilinguals between four and 10 years in both languages. Measures of both spoken and gestural use were examined as a function of age. The results showed that the children’s spoken narrative abilities were related to age in both languages while their rates of gestures were not. The relationship between gesture use and narrative abilities was, at best, weak. These results suggest that fluent bilinguals develop narrative abilities in both languages simultaneously. We discussed the results of the present study in the light of ongoing research on the developmental relationship between speech and gesture in childhood.

This paper examines the effects of English as a second language (L2) on Turkish as a first language (L1) in the domain of wh-scrambling, as formulated in the generative framework. Unlike English, Turkish allows wh-extractions out of islands under certain morphological conditions. The data come from 27 native Turkish speakers, who have immigrated to an English-speaking country at an adult age and used English as a dominant language. The results of an acceptability judgment task revealed the same tendencies in the attrition and monolingual control group towards rejection of certain grammatical wh-extractions. Thus, the findings implicate no L2 influence in L1 change.

This article reports an empirical research into the correlation between adult speakers’ communication strategic competence and their language proficiency by comparing Chinese-English bilinguals’ application of stalling devices in their L1 and L2 spoken discourse. Dörnyei and Kormos’ ((1998). Problem-solving mechanisms in L2 communication. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 20, 349–385) taxonomy of communicative strategies is employed as the analytical framework for the present investigation. The qualitative observations reveal that the general categorical variations of stalling strategy in our participants’ L1 and L2 discourse are indistinguishable, manifesting the universality of linguistic communicative strategies. Yet, participants are found to be less proficient at utilizing L2 fillers than the L1 equivalents with respect to variation. Such phenomenon should be greatly attributed to language specificity of the lexicalized stalling devices and the paucity of authentic L2 stimuli the participants received. The quantitative results indicate that the frequency of stalling devices increases along with the decrease of the speakers’ automaticity of language processing. Specifically, the frequency of L2 stalling strategies is about two times higher than that of its L1 equivalents. The quantitative results further reinforce that L2 processing is less automatic than L1 processing. In brief, both the qualitative and quantitative findings evidence a tight correlation between the speakers’ communication strategic competence and their linguistic proficiency. Finally, some insights into the teaching of non-native stalling strategies for language learners are provided.

According to a national survey on language usage, Veneto dialect (spoken in Veneto, one of Italy’s northeastern regions) benefits from the widest usage range compared to other regional dialects spoken in the Italoromance domain. We collected 35 hours of interactional data and conducted attitudinal interviews. From these data, we examined a family’s language policy (nuclear and extended family) and its influence on a child’s (Francesco, aged 17–30 months) language environment and acquisition of norms of usage. The juxtaposition of the attitudinal interviews of the adults in Francesco’s environment with the interactional data collected revealed numerous discrepancies between the adults’ expressed attitudes and their production. We argue that attitudes do not necessarily predict language choices and that the relationship between the two is more complicated than a cause-and-consequences one, in particular when these concern dialect usage. Rather, there is a dynamic link between attitudes and language choices as these are constantly (re)defined, negotiated and reconfigured during interaction.