标题：The Sharing of Reference Strategies across Two Languages: The Production and Comprehension of Referring Expressions by Greek-Italian Bilingual Children
期刊名称：Discours. Revue de linguistique, psycholinguistique et informatique
电子版ISSN：1963-1723
出版年度：2020
期号：26
页码：1-31
DOI：10.4000/discours.10709
出版社：Laboratoire LATTICE, UMR 8094 ENS/CNRS
摘要：In reference production, speakers have to keep track of discourse referents and use referring expressions that encode the degree of prominence of these referents at any given point in discourse. Usually, more reduced referring expressions (such as overt pronouns or nulls – depending on whether the language at stake is non-null-subject or null-subject, respectively) are used to refer to entities that are prominent in discourse, while more explicit referring expressions (such as full nouns, henceforth DPs [Determiner Phrases]) usually refer to non-prominent referents. Several factors affect a referent’s discourse prominence including the argument (subject vs. object) or information (topic vs. focus) status of its previous mention, the distance (in number of words or clauses) between its current and previous mention and the number of referents that are introduced between two mentions of the same referent (Arnold, 2010). From the comprehension perspective, these prominence-lending (or demoting) cues are used by listeners to interpret referring expressions. For instance, null subjects in null-subject languages such as Italian tend to be interpreted as referring to subject antecedents (Carminati, 2002 as a main reference). However, there is great variation in how a referent’s prominence is mapped into the use of referring expressions (in production) or an interpretation is associated with a referring expression (in comprehension), depending on various factors, including language acquisition and development (Hendriks et al., 2014) or cognitive constraints interacting with the representation of a referent’s prominence (e.g., low working memory skills, which may be associated with a rapid decay in the representation of a referent and its associated degree of prominence, Rosa & Arnold, 2011).
其他摘要：Several studies have observed that bilinguals tend to use and accept overspecified, redundant referring expressions in one of their two languages. This tendency has been mainly analysed as an effect of cross-linguistic influence (for instance, from a non-null-subject language to a null-subject one) or quantity and quality of language exposure. We aim to show that, beyond cross-linguistic and language-exposure effects, the use and acceptability of overspecified forms is the outcome of individual patterns of reference management, which are shared across the two languages. We tested 31 Greek-Italian bilingual children by using a narrative task (assessing the use of referring expressions in discourse) and a timed judgement task (related to the interpretation of referring expressions). The results show that reference strategies can be shared between the two languages and, in the bilingual group at stake in this study, this sharing is not modulated by language dominance or proficiency. The study introduces individual variation as one of the factors to consider when dealing with bilingual reference acquisition.
