Complex morphosyntax

This study builds on existing work on sentence processing in bilinguals. Existing work provides insights into real time processing for morphosyntactic phenomena at the phrase level but work on complex morphosyntax is still comparatively limited.

Long-distance syntactic relationships and, in particular, filler-gap dependencies, which wh- questions are a subtype of (see section 1.2.1 of this chapter) are one area of morphosyntax which remains underexplored in bilingual children in terms of processing. The first study to investigate comprehension of filler-gap dependencies is a study by Roesch & Chondrogianni (2016). This study tested comprehension of German subject and object which-questions as in (12a) and (12b) respectively in L1 French L2 German bilingual children aged 4-6 years.

(12a) subject question

Welche Maus malt den Frosch an ?

WhichFEM-Ø mouseMASC- Ø paints theNOM-ACC frogNOM-ACC? ‘Which mouse is painting the frog?’

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Welche Maus malt der Frosch an ?

WhichFEM- Ø mouseFEM- Ø paints theMASC-NOM frogMASC-NOM?

‘Which mouse is the frog painting?’

The study was based on the assumption that the subject-object asymmetry observed for English is also attested in German and on the observation that object which-questions are locally ambiguous in German as they are in English. If sentences are parsed incrementally, it is likely that object questions in German will initially be misinterpreted as subject questions as is the case in English. This study used an off-line picture selection task where participants heard sentences, in this case, which-questions, and needed to select a picture. The study compared simultaneous and early sequential bilinguals – with a limited length of exposure to German of about 1-3 years – to L1 German age-matched controls. The study in question investigated how monolingual and bilingual children could use disambiguating cues to help processing of which-questions in German. In particular, Roesch & Chondrogianni tested how the children used nominal case to disambiguate and manipulated the position of the cue. The latter was either sentence-initial, i.e. on the wh-word (the noun was masculine so that nominative case could be distinguished from the accusative) or late, i.e. it appeared only on the second NP. The third condition was the double cue where there was a disambiguating cue both on the wh-word and on the second NP

The manipulation was based on the gender of the nouns. Masculine nouns in German carry overt case marking contrast between nominative and accusative for the determiner and the adjective (and potentially the noun) which is not the case for feminine and neuter.

Roesch & Chondrogianni found lower accuracy for object which-questions relative to subject questions and an advantage that was more pronounced in the double cue condition. Overall

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the monolinguals had higher accuracy scores than both groups of bilinguals. The most beneficial cue for disambiguation was the double cue followed by the cue at the start of the sentence. The three groups benefited from the disambiguating cue differently. The monolinguals utilised the cue in all three conditions but the simultaneous bilinguals benefited only from the presence of a disambiguating cue at the start of the sentence. This benefit was absent from the sequential bilinguals. These results are consistent with Meisel (2009) who argued that early sequential bilinguals differ to simultaneous bilinguals and monolingual children. It is also one of the studies which contradicts earlier research previously reviewed as qualitative differences between bilingual and monolingual children are indeed observed. However the fact that the bilingual children made both errors relating to the reversal of thematic roles but also selected a distractor image suggests that their parsing strategies were neither random nor purely reliant on linear word order. Therefore, the difficulty the sequential bilinguals have is arguably not one of representational deficit but rather of using the appropriate cues in real time when these are not adequately prominent.

Garden-path sentences are another type of syntactically complex sentence. Papangeli & Marinis (2010) examined how L1 Russian L2 Greek bilingual children aged 9-12 years process sentences with temporary ambiguity in Greek in comparison to monolingual controls using a self-paced listening task. Papangeli & Marinis manipulated a verb that was either optionally transitive or always intransitive and the reading of the NP was either the subject of the verb or the object (based on agreement between the ambiguous NP and the verb following it). In the event of the optionally transitive verb, the subsequent NP is ambiguous; it may the subject of a forthcoming verb but it is most likely going to be interpreted as the object of the verb the parser has encountered. Examples of the experimental items are depicted in (13a-d);

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Eno maγireve ta psaria kaike sto furno

While cooking-PST-3SG the-NEU.PL.Ø fish-NEU.PL.Ø, burned-PST.3SG in.the- MASC.ACC oven-MASC.ACC

‘While he/she was cooking the fish, she/he was burned in/by the oven” (13b) Optional infinitive – intransitive interpretation (garden-path)

Eno maγireve ta psaria kaikan sto furno

While cooking-PST-3SG the-NEU.PL.Ø, burned-PST.3PL in.the-MASC.ACC oven- MASC.ACC

‘While he/she was cooking, the fish were burned in/by the oven’ (13c) Intransitive verb – transitive interpretation (ungrammatical)

* Eno etrehe ta psarya kaike sto furno

While running-PST-3SG the-NEU.PL.Ø, burned-PST.3SG in.the-MASC.ACC oven- MASC.ACC

‘While he/she was running the fish.ACC, he/she was burned in/by the oven’ (13d) Intransitive verb - intransitive interpretation

Eno etrehe ta psarya kaikan sto furno

While running-PST-3SG the-NEU.PL.Ø, burned-PST.3PL in.the-MASC.ACC oven- MASC.ACC

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The ambiguous NP contained a neuter noun as these are ambiguous for nominative or accusative case in Greek. This way, it was unclear what the syntactic function of the NP was until the verb. In the case of the intransitive verbs, the object interpretation of the NP was ungrammatical but in the sentences with optionally transitive verbs both readings are grammatical. Participants heard the sentences in segments and then had to judge the sentences’ grammaticality. Papangeli & Marinis conducted two experiments; one where the intonation of the sentence was flat providing no cues towards one of the two interpretations and another where the sentences were read with natural intonation where cues guide towards one reading over the other and garden-path effects are thus not expected. In the experimental without prosodic cues, the monolingual children showed a slowdown at the post-critical segment for the sentences with an optionally transitive verb and a subject reading of the NP relative to the other three conditions. This reflects garden-pathing; the L1 Greek children were garden pathed and interpreted the ambiguous NP as the object of the verb where this was permitted. The slowdown at the disambiguating segment suggests that they are sensitive to the agreement mismatch between the second NP and the second verb and that this signals that the original interpretation is wrong. This was not found for the bilingual children. On the other hand, the monolingual children did not show this slowdown in the experiment with the presence of prosodic cues suggesting that using available cues they were not garden-pathed. Instead, they slowed down generally for the ungrammatical sentences relative to the grammatical ones at the post-critical segment. Between-experiment comparisons revealed an interaction of group by prosody further supporting the notion that only the monolingual children utilised prosodic cues to avoid initial misinterpretation of locally ambiguous sentences. Conversely, there was no difference between the two experiments for the bilinguals; they were not garden-pathed in the experiment with the intonational cues, as would maybe be expected. Crucially, they did not show effects of garden-pathing when

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intonational cues to guide them towards a correct interpretation were absent and, thus it would be expected that incremental processing would lead to misinterpretation. This is a qualitative difference between the two groups and, in this sense, not in line with previous studies which showed no qualitative differences between monolingual and bilingual children in processing. This would indicate that the bilinguals were not able to utilise the subcategorization information of the verb to build an expectation of an upcoming object.

Differences between bilingual and monolingual children have also been observed with regards to how they use available information to predict the upcoming content of the sentence that they are listening to. It should be noted that filler-gap dependencies and garden-path sentences also entail the need for prediction as the parser commits to a specific interpretation which subsequently needs to be revised. The reason for this is that the parser does not wait until disambiguation when it encounters ambiguity. Instead, it utilises available knowledge about the relevant syntactic structures from previous exposure to build a syntactic structure and interpretation even though this interpretation is only a possibility prior to disambiguation. The need to revise comes from the failure of the disambiguating segment to confirm the parser’s expectations. For example, in wh-questions, the parser anticipates an expected gap on the basis of the filler7. The parser will subsequently predict that the first plausible gap for the filler is the real one. For garden-path sentences, the parser utilises the subcategorization information of the verb, i.e. that it is potentially transitive, and therefore, expects an object. Consequently, it will interpret the upcoming NP as the verb’s object even though the sentence so far does not indicate this definitively.

Lemmerth & Hopp (2019) investigated how bilingual children use gender on the determiner and/or adjective to predict upcoming nouns in a visual-world paradigm study. Lemmerth &

7 _{This is framed in terms of a generativist syntax approach; this would not be inconsistent}

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Hopp tested simultaneous and early sequential (mean age of onset 2 years) L1 Russian L2 German bilingual children aged 6-9 years and compared them to age-matched monolingual German speakers. Participants heard questions in the form “Where is DETERMINER

ADJECTIVE NOUN?”, as demonstrated in (14a-c) while looking at four pictures.

(14a) masculine gender nouns

a. der kleine Käse

theMASC smallAMBIGUOUS cheeseMASC

‘the small cheese’

(14b) feminine gender nouns

die kleine Karte

theFEM smallAMBIGUOUS cardFEM

‘the small card’

(14c) neuter gender nouns

das kleine Auge

theNEUT smallAMBIGUOUS eyeNEUT

‘the small eye

Gaze data were collected while the participants heard the question and until they responded. Lemmerth & Hopp used nouns in German that either had the same or different grammatical gender as in Russian. They also manipulated the gender cue to be either on the determiner alone (in this case, a definite article) or on the determiner and the adjective preceding the noun. Lemmerth & Hopp found that the simultaneous bilinguals behaved similarly to the

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monolinguals and used gender to predict upcoming nouns. This was irrespective of whether the noun had the same or different grammatical gender in Russian to German. The sequential bilinguals, however, use the cue on the adjective or the determiner only when the noun in German had the same grammatical gender as it did in Russian. Lemmerth & Hopp argued on the basis of their findings that grammatical gender in the sequential bilinguals was mediated by the lexicon in the first language although this was not the case for the simultaneous bilinguals.

In another study using the visual world paradigm, a study by Lew-Williams (2017) examined whether bilinguals make use of grammatical gender cues as they appear on Spanish definite articles to predict upcoming material, i.e. whether looks to a picture of objects which matched those features increased after hearing the definite article. Participants looked at a set of two pictures and heard either a question in the form of “Where is the…?” or an instruction in the form of “Find the …?”. It should be noted that the determiner in Spanish is marked for gender and number and can, thus be used to predict the upcoming noun. That is if one of the two objects matches the grammatical gender of the determiner, the parser will anticipate this noun to be the upcoming noun. If both objects have the same gender, which matches that of the determiner, this information cannot be used. In a subsequent experiment with the same design, Lew-Williams (2017) manipulated the biological gender of the nouns. In a third experiment, Lew-Williams manipulated the number of the objects in the visual stimuli (singular or plural) following the same experimental design. Lew-Williams measured the time needed for participants to reorient their looks towards the correct picture, i.e. the one in the instructions or question as a dependant variable, a type of reaction time. Results showed the school aged bilingual children were able to orient their gaze to the correct picture earlier when there was a disambiguating cue similarly to the monolingual children for number and biological gender but not for grammatical gender. This study, however, tested children in an

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immersion context where the L2 was not the majority language and compared them to simultaneous Spanish-English bilinguals.

In sum, the results have so far shown some consistencies but at the same time are varied. An emerging consensus is that bilingual children have knowledge of syntax and morphology. This is evidenced by the fact that the bilingual children show sensitivity to ungrammaticalities as reaction times at the point where these occur, or immediately thereafter, are longer than in the respective sentences where there are no ungrammaticalities (e.g. Blom & Vasić, 2011; Chondrogianni & Marinis 2012, 2016; Chondrogianni et al. 2015a, 2015b). This effect is also observed in monolinguals. This entails that any differences observed between monolinguals and bilinguals in production (e.g. Chondrogianni et al. 2015a) are not due to lack of knowledge per se but to other factors which may burden language production. Bilingual children also show similar processing mechanisms; the absence of an interaction between group and grammaticality suggests that both monolingual and bilingual children slowed down equally for sentences with ungrammaticality. The main difference between bilingual and monolingual children in the studies reviewed is that the bilinguals are overall slower in terms of reaction times, suggesting less efficient processing. A further difference is that bilinguals may have greater difficulty with particular conditions which are expected to be harder across groups even if the effects are observed in the monolinguals as well. In terms of accuracy, the majority of studies find lower accuracy for the bilingual group relative to the monolinguals, although both groups still have high above- chance performance. A second difference found between bilingual and monolingual children in terms of morphosyntactic processing is in their reduced ability to utilise available information for purposes of predictive processing or facilitating disambiguation. This ability may be absent completely for some aspects of morphosyntactic processing (Lew-Williams, 2017 for use of grammatical gender on the determiner to predict upcoming nouns, Papangeli

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& Marinis 2010 for absence of garden-path effects in bilingual children). Alternatively, it may be more restricted in terms of context (use of gender on the determiner to predict upcoming noun only when the noun has the same gender in both languages; Lemmerth & Hopp, 2018) or type of bilingual (effects found for simultaneous but not early sequential bilingual; Roesch & Chondrogianni, 2016). Available studies have tested late sequential bilinguals with an L2 other than English (Lew-Williams, 2017 for Spanish; Lemmerth & Hopp, 2018; Roesch & Chondrogianni, 2016 for German, Papangeli & Marinis, 2010). There are currently no studies on morphosyntactic processing where there is a need for prediction or disambiguation to be made during processing in bilingual children for English.