Bleotu Adina Camelia, Foucault Deborah, Roeper Tom, Lakshmanan Usha
English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania.
Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2025 Aug 18;19:1537488. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1537488. eCollection 2025.
Our research contributes to debates about the role of Universal Grammar constraints and crosslinguistic influence in sequential bilingual acquisition and use. We investigate experimentally how adult Romanian L1-English L2 bilinguals interpret sequential adjectival modifiers of a noun in recursive set-subset contexts in both languages (e.g., , lit. 'flowers small red' in Romanian L1, in English L2, meaning 'the subset of red flowers among the set of small flowers', and not the coordinative 'the red and small flowers'). We ask whether the Recursive Set-Subset Ordering (RSSO) Constraint is observed in both Romanian L1 and proficient English L2 speakers, such that the adjective closer to the head noun indicates the set and the adjective further away indicates the subset. Our study employs a story-based, forced choice comprehension task to test RSSO against Adjective Ordering Restrictions (AORs), as two competing possible sources for adjective ordering and interpretation. While AOR captures ordering preferences of adjectives naming conceptual properties (e.g., A A N in English, N A A in Romanian), RSSO posits a structure-dependent principle in terms of sets and subsets (e.g., A A N in English, N A A in Romanian). We find that bilinguals adhere to the RSSO in both languages even in contexts where AOR and RSSO are in conflict. This finding supports RSSO's status as a UG syntactic-semantic constraint. Interestingly, for a few participants, we also found evidence for crosslinguistic influence stemming from language-specific differences in branching directionality, linear order, and AORs.
我们的研究为有关普遍语法限制和跨语言影响在顺序双语习得与使用中的作用的辩论做出了贡献。我们通过实验研究成年罗马尼亚语母语者-英语二语者如何在两种语言的递归集-子集语境中解释名词的顺序形容词修饰语（例如，罗马尼亚语母语中“flowers small red”，字面意思为“花小红色”，英语二语中为“small red flowers”，意思是“小花集合中的红色花子集”，而非并列的“红色和小的花”）。我们询问罗马尼亚语母语者和熟练的英语二语者是否都遵循递归集-子集排序（RSSO）限制，即更靠近中心名词的形容词表示集合，更远的形容词表示子集。我们的研究采用基于故事的强制选择理解任务，以测试RSSO与形容词排序限制（AOR），将其作为形容词排序和解释的两种相互竞争的可能来源。虽然AOR捕捉命名概念属性的形容词的排序偏好（例如，英语中A A N，罗马尼亚语中N A A），但RSSO提出了一个基于集合和子集的结构依赖原则（例如，英语中A A N，罗马尼亚语中N A A）。我们发现双语者在两种语言中都遵循RSSO，即使在AOR和RSSO冲突的语境中也是如此。这一发现支持了RSSO作为一种普遍语法句法-语义限制的地位。有趣的是，对于一些参与者，我们还发现了因分支方向性、线性顺序和AORs方面的语言特定差异而产生的跨语言影响的证据。
