Age and Input Effect in Simultaneous Bilingual: Turkish and Italian

Year 2017, Volume: 3 Issue: 3, 152 - 163, 11.12.2017

Anna Lia Proietti Ergün

Abstract

This study reports on acceptability
judgment (AJ) and translation data from 10 simultaneous Turkish-Italian
bilinguals with age-matched Turkish and Italian monolinguals as control group.
The linguistic property investigated is postverbal subjects occurring with
unaccusative verbs. The results of the AJ task in Turkish revealed significant
difference between groups. However, in the Italian AJ task, significant
variability was found in younger bilinguals. Only bilinguals participated in
the translation task. In translation into Turkish, always pragmatically
appropriate sentences were produced. When translating into Italian significant
variability was found in younger bilinguals and those enrolled in Turkish
schools.

Keywords

Bilingualism, children, crosslinguistic interference, interfaces, Italian

References

• Argyri, E. and Sorace, A. (2007). Crosslinguistic influence and language dominance in older bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition: 77-99.
• Bialystok, E. (2007). Cognitive effects of bilingualism: How linguistic experience leads to cognitive change. The International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 10(3), 210-223
• Bialystok, E. (1991). Metalinguistic dimensions of bilingual language proficiency. In E. Bialystok (Ed.), Language processing in bilingual children. pp.113–140. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: Language Literacy and Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Belletti, A. (2001). Inversion as focalization. Subject Inversion in Romance and the Theory of Universal Grammar, pp. 60–90.
• Belletti, A. (2004) Aspects of the low IP area. In L. Rizzi (Ed.), The structure of CP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 2 (pp. 16–51). New York: Oxford University Press.
• Bini M. (1993). La adquisición del italiano: más allá de las propiedades sintácticas del parámetro pro-drop. In J.M Liceras (Ed), La lingüística y el análisis de los sistemas no nativos, pp. 126–139. Ottawa: Dovehouse.
• Domínguez, L. (2013). Understanding Interfaces: Second language acquisition and first language attrition of Spanish subject realization and word order variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.