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Article published In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 11:6 (2021) ► pp.873–908

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Acquisition of quantified partitivity in Catalan-Spanish bilingualism

Influence from child-level and language-level factors

 | University of Alberta
Published online: 19 December 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.19016.sot
Abstract
Child-level factors such as input quantity and quality have received little attention by studies of bilingual language acquisition in situations of societal bilingualism. The present study addresses this gap by investigating the acquisition of quantified partitivity in Catalan-Spanish bilingualism. The two languages present different licensing conditions for noun ellipsis in quantified partitive objects: Catalan requires quantitative clitic en whereas Spanish requires only the quantifier. Bilingual participants (N = 338), ages 4–9, were administered two Oral Production Tasks, one for each language. Analyses of participants’ responses showed that a different combination of child-level factors accounted for their performance in each language, revealing dominance effects. Once participants were classified into three groups (Catalan-dominant, Balanced bilingual, and Spanish-dominant) according to their language dominance, between-group differences were found in each language with respect to the acquisition timeline of the respective structure.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Bilingualism in Catalunya
  • 3.Factors in the acquisition of morphosyntax
    • 3.1Language-level factors: Properties of the target structure
    • 3.2Input quantity
    • 3.3Input quality
    • 3.4The other language: Cross-linguistic influence
  • 4.Quantified partitivity
    • 4.1Phenomenon
      • 4.1.1Acquisition of N-ellipsis in Catalan: Clitic en
      • 4.1.2Acquisition of N-ellipsis in Spanish
    • 4.2Quantified partitivity in Catalan and Spanish: Difficulty of the structure
  • 5.The present study
    • 5.1Research questions
    • 5.2Participants
    • 5.3Procedures
      • Background questionnaire
      • OPT
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Factors predicting production of target quantified partitive constructions
    • 6.2Timeline of the acquisition of language-specific licensing strategies
      • 6.2.1Catalan
      • 6.2.2Spanish
  • 7.Discussion
    • 7.1Factors in the acquisition of quantified partitivity
    • 7.2Timelines of acquisition
    • 7.3Cross-linguistic influence
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
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