Paradis Johanne, Navarro Samuel
Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
J Child Lang. 2003 May;30(2):371-93. doi: 10.1017/s0305000903005609.
This study investigated whether crosslinguistic interference occurs in the domain of subject realization in Spanish in a bilingual acquisition context. We were also interested in exploring whether the source of the interference is due to child-internal crosslanguage contact between English and Spanish, as is commonly assumed, or due to the nature of the language input in a bilingual family, a factor which has not typically been considered in studies of crosslinguistic influence. The use of subjects in a null subject language like Spanish is a phenomenon linked to the pragmatics/syntax interface of the grammar, and thus, is a domain where crosslinguistic interference is predicted to be likely to occur in bilingual acquisition (Müller & Hulk, 2001). Using spontaneous language data available from CHILDES (www.childes.psy.cmu.edu), we examined the use of overt subjects in Spanish by two Spanish monolingual children (ages: 1;8-2;7 and 1;8-1;11) one Spanish-English bilingual child (age 1;9-2;6) and their parental interlocutors. We looked at the proportions of overt versus null subjects as well as the discourse-pragmatic contexts of overt subject use by the children in order to uncover bilingual/monolingual differences in the distributional properties and the functional determinants of subject realization. We also looked at identical variables in the speech of the children's parental interlocutors to investigate the potential influence of the input on the children's output. Our results suggest that the bilingual child showed patterns in her subject realizations in Spanish that could be interpreted as due to crosslinguistic effects from English; however, there is also evidence that these effects may have a source in the input, rather than resulting from internal crosslanguage contact. While our data do not permit us to distinguish conclusively between these two possible sources, they indicate that future research on crosslinguistic influence in bilingual acquisition should take input into account.
本研究调查了在双语习得环境中，西班牙语主语实现领域是否会出现跨语言干扰。我们还想探究干扰的来源是如通常所认为的那样，源于英语和西班牙语之间儿童内部的跨语言接触，还是由于双语家庭中语言输入的性质，而这一因素在跨语言影响研究中通常未被考虑。在像西班牙语这样的零主语语言中主语的使用是一种与语法的语用学/句法接口相关的现象，因此，在双语习得中，这是一个预计可能会出现跨语言干扰的领域（Müller & Hulk，2001）。利用从儿童语言数据交换系统（CHILDES，网址：www.childes.psy.cmu.edu）获取的自发语言数据，我们考察了两名西班牙语单语儿童（年龄分别为1岁8个月至2岁7个月和1岁8个月至1岁11个月）、一名西班牙 - 英语双语儿童（年龄为1岁9个月至2岁6个月）及其父母对话者在西班牙语中对显性主语的使用情况。我们观察了显性主语与零主语的比例，以及儿童使用显性主语的话语语用语境，以揭示双语/单语在主语实现的分布特性和功能决定因素方面的差异。我们还观察了儿童父母对话者言语中的相同变量，以研究输入对儿童输出的潜在影响。我们的研究结果表明，双语儿童在西班牙语主语实现方面呈现出的模式可以被解释为是受英语跨语言影响的结果；然而，也有证据表明这些影响可能源于输入而非内部跨语言接触。虽然我们的数据无法让我们明确区分这两种可能的来源，但它们表明未来关于双语习得中跨语言影响的研究应将输入因素考虑在内。
