Language Dominance Affects Bilingual Performance and Processing Outcomes in Adulthood.

This study examines the role of language dominance (LD) on linguistic competence outcomes in two types of early bilinguals: (i) child L2 learners of Catalan (L1 Spanish-L2 Catalan and, (ii) child Spanish L2 learners (L1 Catalan-L2 Spanish). Most child L2 studies typically focus on the development of the languages during childhood and either focus on L1 development or L2 development. Typically, these child L2 learners are immersed in the second language. We capitalize on the unique situation in Catalonia, testing the Spanish and Catalan of both sets of bilinguals, where dominance in either Spanish or Catalan is possible. We examine the co-occurrence of Sentential Negation (SN) with a Negative Concord Item (NCI) in pre-verbal position (Catalan only) and Differential Object Marking (DOM) (Spanish only). The results show that remaining dominant in the L1 contributes to the maintenance of target-like behavior in the language.

Relating (Un)acceptability to Interpretation. Experimental Investigations on Negation.

Although contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the boundary of what falls outside the scope of grammar, investigations far more rarely take into consideration the possible interpretations of such sentences, perhaps because these interpretations are commonly prejudged as irrelevant or unreliable across speakers. In this paper we provide the results of two experiments in which participants had to make parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments of sentences presenting various types of negative dependencies in Basque and in two varieties of Spanish (Castilian Spanish and Basque Country Spanish). Our results show that acceptable sentences are uniformly assigned a single negation reading in the two languages. However, while unacceptable sentences consistently convey single negation in Basque, they are interpreted at chance in both varieties of Spanish. These results confirm that judgment data that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable negative utterances can inform us not only about an adult's grammar of his/her particular language but also about interesting cross-linguistic differences. We conclude that the acceptability and interpretation of (un)grammatical negative sentences can serve linguistic theory construction by helping to disentangle basic assumptions about the nature of various negative dependencies.

Is there a universal answering strategy for rejecting negative propositions? Typological evidence on the use of prosody and gesture.

Previous research has proposed that languages diverge with respect to how their speakers confirm and contradict negative questions. Taking into account the classification between truth-based and polarity-based languages, this paper is mainly concerned with the expression of REJECT (a semantic operation that signals a contradiction move with respect to the common ground, along Krifka's lines) in two languages belonging to two typologically distinct answering systems, namely Catalan (polarity-based) and Russian (a mixed system using polarity-based, truth-based, and echoic strategies). This investigation has two goals. First, to assess empirically the relevance of prosodic and gestural patterns in the interpretation of confirming and rejecting responses to negative polar questions. Second, to test the claim that in fact speakers resort to strikingly similar universal strategies at the time of expressing rejecting answers to discourse accessible negative assertions and negative polar questions, namely the use of linguistic units that encode REJECT in combination with ASSERT. The results of our investigation support the existence of a universal answering system for rejecting negative polar questions that integrates lexical and syntactic strategies with prosodic and gestural patterns, and instantiate the REJECT and ASSERT operators. We will also discuss the implications these results have for the truth-based vs. polarity-based taxonomy.