Predictive processing and cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children

La conferenza fa parte del ciclo delle Conversazioni linguistiche, una serie di incontri che offrono a linguiste/i italiane/i e internazionali un'occasione per confrontarsi sui rispettivi studi e per tenersi aggiornate/i sui nuovi sviluppi della ricerca.

• Jasmjin Bosch

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

Descrizione

Listeners use lexical or morphosyntactic cues to anticipate upcoming words, and monolingual children are able to do so from a very young age. Using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, we investigated linguistic prediction in bilingual children, whose online processing may be different even when offline comprehension is on target. Specifically, we examined whether Italian-German and Italian-Mandarin bilingual children anticipated upcoming nouns on the basis of gender and number agreement on the preceding article. Our results suggest that bilingual children are able to rapidly process speech in their L2 by making use of predictive mechanisms, even when they have to rely on a feature which is expressed differently in their L1. However, depending on their language dominance, they may sometimes experience processing delays related to cross-linguistic influence.