BIBA - BIDIRECTIONAL EFFECTS OF BILINGUALISM ACCROSS AGES (PID2020-114276GB-I00) PIs: Aurora Bel & Silvia Perpiñán

The debate regarding the future of Catalan and Spanish in a bilingual society such as Catalonia is not new and does not seem to be concluded any time soon. Whereas much has been said regarding the uses of both languages in the educational community and other public spheres, very little has been investigated regarding the actual linguistic knowledge of the population, the development of both languages early in life and beyond, and the influence that both languages mutually undergo as a result of their contact. The Bidirectional Effects of Bilingualism Across Ages (BIBA) project aims to fill this void by investigating Catalan-Spanish bilingualism from a linguistic and psycholinguistic point of view, taking as the main objects of study the bilingual speaker and the two languages that cohabit his/her mind from a very early age.
Through a series of linguistic and psycholinguistic methods and tests, and focusing on several morphosyntactic structures, this crosssectional study addresses the acquisition, development, maintenance, and interaction of both languages, Catalan and Spanish, in sustained societal bilingualism. By taking into account language dominance as measured by relevant factors such as quantity and quality of input, age of onset of acquisition, proficiency, language identity and place of residence, we aim to determine the principal predictors that modulate language acquisition, language development, and crosslinguistic influence in bilinguals across ages. Indeed, an indirect result of this project would be to grant the Catalan-Spanish context the place it deserves in the study of bilingualism at large. That is, we want to transcend the local circumstance and investigate this context of bilingualism as any other bilingualism context, in a way that our study will reveal general, --i.e.: universal--, processes and outcomes of early bilingualism.
The originality of our project lays in two key factors: on the one hand, we propose to investigate Catalan-Spanish bilingualism bidirectionally. That is, we will test both of our participants languages focusing on the same morphosyntactic structures, which all present
microparametric differences: 1- Differential Object Marking (DOM), 2- the distribution of copular verbs, and 3- existential constructions. On the other hand, we propose a cross-sectional study in which typically neglected ages in the study of the development of bilingualism (ages 7-15) will be included and later compared to adult speakers, their input providers. We believe these early-literacy ages are crucial in fixing grammatical knowledge and in detecting incipient imbalances between the languages. Only by an exhaustive comparison between and within different types of bilinguals, in this case in minimally different languages, will we be able to assess general bilingualism processes such as crosslinguistic influence (CLI), functional convergence, simplification, complexification, or eventual language change. Finally, we encourage the study of bilingualism without the need for comparing bilinguals to monolinguals, particularly in the case of minority languages in which a monolingual group is not (always) available.

CONTACT - PROCESSING AND REPRESENTATION OF MULTILEVEL CONSTRUCTIONS: EFFECTS OF LINGUISTIC CONTACT ON HERITAGE SPEAKERS AND FUNCTIONAL BILINGUALS (FFI2016-75082-P) PI: Aurora Bel

Building on previous findings from funded research projects (FFI2012-35058 & FFI2009-09349, PI Aurora Bel), the objective of this project is to investigate how specific linguistic issues which are characterized by being complex and non-categorical are acquired and processed by native bilingual and non-native speakers (who are also bilingual). We aim to do this by making use of the combination of theoretical linguistics and the experimental methods that psycholinguistics has developed in the study of the acquisition of language and its behavior. Starting from our own findings and also other recent ones, we intend to go beyond the study of the restrictions that account for (1) the choice of grammatical pronominal subjects, (2) the type and order of words in relative clauses, and (3) case marking of direct objects (Differential Object Marking). All of these constructions are good examples of the multiple interaction of factors that regulate their realization as they involve relations at different levels: syntax, discourse and the lexicon. Bilingual individuals provide an excellent testing field to check how interactions between syntax and other levels take place since these spekers show variable mastery in different modules (Benmamoun, Montrul and Polinsky 2013; Meisel 2011; Slabakova 2013), something which is in principle impossible to test in monolingual speakers.

Our working hypothesis is that although interface elements and structures are unstable (a proposal which follows from the Interface Hypothesis, Sorace 2005, 2011, which has been the frame of previous projects) the simultaneous activation of information of different levels - the relation between the computational and interpretive components makes them complex. As such, they become a potential space of linguistic divergence between native and non-native speakers while they are also complex for native speakers (Hopp 2010, 2014). Speakers with more than one linguistic system can, making it simple, turn to two sources in order to solve this complexity: one of individual scope (solutions of another language, or crosslinguistic influence) and another one of general scope (general linguistic and processing principles). The underlying idea is that the variability triggered by unstable knowledge is persistent and systematic but it is constrained.

The populations which are more sensitive to this type of phenomena are highly functional bilingual speakers. We distinguish three subgroups: bilingual speakers of contact varieties in a bilingual social context (that is, speakers of bilingual communities), bilingual speakers in a non-bilingual social context (that is, heritage speakers) and bilingual L2 learners with advanced or almost native levels of proficiency. We focus our proposal on Spanish and English as our object of study and on bilingual speakers with the specific profiles mentioned who speak one of these two languages. The study of this type of constructions in highly functional bilingual speakers by means of offline (AJT, production tasks, narratives) and online techniques (eyetracking, reaction time data) will provide evidence of the importance of external factors such as context to the extent that bilingual speakers with different levels of exposure and mastery show variability. However, this will also provide evidence of factors that are internal to the linguistic systems and of individual factors related with processing limitations which are inherent to speakers in general, but which affect bilingual speakers in a higher degree such as working memory and inhibition control.