L1 Spanish in contact with HL English and with HL Bulgarian: Does language dominance relate to lexical specialization?

In the case of simultaneous bilingual acquisition, language dominance has been defined in terms of language proficiency (e.g., Petersen 1988; Genesee et al. 1995), language knowledge (e.g., Yip and Matthews 2006), or related to the amount of language input (e.g., Romaine 1995). Liceras et al. (2008) offer a language-internal definition of the dominant language (DL) in terms of the Grammatical Features Spell-out Hypothesis (GFSH). Under the GFSH, the DL is the language whose features are more lexically specialized. It is also the language that will determine both the directionality as well as the effect of crosslinguistic influence.

In the case of the acquisition of copula verbs in English and Spanish, Fernández Fuertes and Liceras (2010) argue that, given the lexical specialization in Spanish (two copulas, 1), as opposed to English (one copula, 2), bilingual children overcome the null copula stage that characterizes monolingual children sooner (Becker 2004). This will be so because the lexically specialized language will make the necessity of the overt copula in English more obvious.

1. pro es una investigadora           pro está en Valladolid                   SER/ESTAR 
2. she is a researcher                     She is in Valladolid                      BE 
3. Tya e izledovatel                       Tya e v Valladolid                        SUM               

Considering these previous works and in order to test the GFSH, we analyze the copula-auxiliary verbs of two L1Spanish/HL(heritage)English bilingual children (FerFuLice corpus) and one L1Spanish/HLBulgarian child (ra2UVALAL corpus) from the age of 2;03 to the age of 5;00. The spontaneous longitudinal bilingual data are compared to L1 English (Brown corpus), L1 Spanish (Marrero corpus), and L1 Bulgarian (LabLing corpus) monolingual data. These corpora, except for the ra2UVALAL, are available in CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000).

Given that these verbs are lexically specialized in Spanish (1) but not in English (2) or in Bulgarian (3), the 2L1 children show no influence from the one-copula language into Spanish, and their production is similar to that of monolinguals. However, in the case of the English and Bulgarian verbs, Spanish accelerates the acquisition of the adult-like structures compared to L1 children, which indicates that the DL as per the GFSH is shaping these children's acquisition patterns.

Selected references:

Becker, M. 2004. Copula omission is a grammatical reflex. Language Acquisition 12(2), 157-167

Fernández Fuertes, R., J.M. Liceras. 2010. Copula omission in the English developing grammar of English/Spanish bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 13(5), 525-551

Genesee, F., E. Nicoladis, J. Paradis. 1995. Language differentiation in early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language 22, 611-631

Liceras, J.M., R. Fernández Fuertes, S. Perales, R. Pérez-Tattam, K.T. Spradlin. 2008. Gender and gender agreement in the bilingual native and non-native grammar: a view from child and adult functional-lexical mixings. Lingua 118(6), 827-251

MacWhinney, B. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. The Database (Vol. 2). Lawrence Erlbaum

Petersen, J. 1988. Word-internal code-switching constrains in a bilingual child's grammar. Linguistics 26,479-493

Romaine, S. 1995. Bilingualism. Blackwell

Yip, V. S. Matthews. 2006. Assessing language dominance in bilingual acquisition: a case for mean length utterance differentials. Language Assessment Quarterly 3(2),97-116