Variable Clitic Placement in Monolingual and Bilingual Spanish-Speaking Adolescents
Document Type
Paper Presentation
Presenter Language
English
Research Area
Bilingualism and multilingualism
Location
MBSC Council Room 306
Start Date
19-10-2024 10:00 AM
End Date
19-10-2024 10:30 AM
Abstract
Abstract
Many structures in language show variation. One example of variation in Spanish is clitic placement in restructuring contexts, where the clitic pronoun can appear after the infinitive Quiero hacerlo (enclisis) or before the conjugated verb Lo quiero hacer (proclisis), with no change in meaning. The acquisition of clitic pronouns and their position has been studied bilingual children: Some studies have found that Spanish-English bilingual children produce more enclisis than proclisis (Pérez Léroux et al. 2011); while others documented higher rates of proclisis than enclisis (Requena & Dracos 2018). Because structures that are variable in the input may take longer to be acquired, this study investigated variable clitic placement (VCP) in Spanish-speaking bilingual adolescents, an understudied population in bilingualism. If adolescence is a time of variability and continued development, then significantly different patterns would be predicted when compared with adults in their community. The goals of this study, therefore, were to determine the patterns of VCP for monolingual and bilingual adolescents and adults using three different tasks as measures for preference and acquisition of VCP.
It was hypothesized that monolingual and adult bilingual Spanish speakers would show greater proclivity to proclisis than enclisis, as documented in corpus studies (Davies, 1995), whereas the bilingual Spanish-speaking adolescents, who tend to be dominant in English, would realize significantly different patterns of VCP than monolingual adolescents. Participants were 25 monolingual Spanish-speaking adolescents from Honduras, 25 monolingual adults from the same community, 25 Spanish-English bilingual adolescents from the USA, and 25 adults from the same community. Participants completed a narrative task, a sentence repetition task, and an elicited production task.
The results of the three tasks revealed a consistent pattern of preference for proclisis over enclisis for all groups. As predicted, the US adolescents were significantly less accurate than the other groups, especially in the sentence repetition task, where some instances of enclisis were repeated with proclisis. Overall, our study demonstrates the robustness of clitics and VCP in the morphosyntax of bilingual adolescents.
Keywords
Adolescent heritage speakers, Spanish, clitics, morphosyntactic variation
Variable Clitic Placement in Monolingual and Bilingual Spanish-Speaking Adolescents
MBSC Council Room 306
Abstract
Many structures in language show variation. One example of variation in Spanish is clitic placement in restructuring contexts, where the clitic pronoun can appear after the infinitive Quiero hacerlo (enclisis) or before the conjugated verb Lo quiero hacer (proclisis), with no change in meaning. The acquisition of clitic pronouns and their position has been studied bilingual children: Some studies have found that Spanish-English bilingual children produce more enclisis than proclisis (Pérez Léroux et al. 2011); while others documented higher rates of proclisis than enclisis (Requena & Dracos 2018). Because structures that are variable in the input may take longer to be acquired, this study investigated variable clitic placement (VCP) in Spanish-speaking bilingual adolescents, an understudied population in bilingualism. If adolescence is a time of variability and continued development, then significantly different patterns would be predicted when compared with adults in their community. The goals of this study, therefore, were to determine the patterns of VCP for monolingual and bilingual adolescents and adults using three different tasks as measures for preference and acquisition of VCP.
It was hypothesized that monolingual and adult bilingual Spanish speakers would show greater proclivity to proclisis than enclisis, as documented in corpus studies (Davies, 1995), whereas the bilingual Spanish-speaking adolescents, who tend to be dominant in English, would realize significantly different patterns of VCP than monolingual adolescents. Participants were 25 monolingual Spanish-speaking adolescents from Honduras, 25 monolingual adults from the same community, 25 Spanish-English bilingual adolescents from the USA, and 25 adults from the same community. Participants completed a narrative task, a sentence repetition task, and an elicited production task.
The results of the three tasks revealed a consistent pattern of preference for proclisis over enclisis for all groups. As predicted, the US adolescents were significantly less accurate than the other groups, especially in the sentence repetition task, where some instances of enclisis were repeated with proclisis. Overall, our study demonstrates the robustness of clitics and VCP in the morphosyntax of bilingual adolescents.
Keywords
Adolescent heritage speakers, Spanish, clitics, morphosyntactic variation