Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics (Jun 2018)
Anaphora resolution in 2L1 Romanian. Evidence from Romanian-Hungarian bilinguals
Abstract
The paper reports the results of an experimental study on intra-sentential anaphora resolution in 2L1 Romanian, by Romanian-Hungarian bilingual children. I investigated the interpretation of null, overt and demonstrative pronoun subjects by means of a picture selection task. Two bilingual groups aged 5-6 years and 8-9 years were compared to two age-matched Romanian control groups. While the monolinguals show progress from the younger to the older age group regarding the interpretation of the null pronoun, the bilinguals give at chance responses in both age groups. In the overt pronoun condition, with the exception of the younger monolinguals who showed a non-adult-like subject bias, none of the groups showed any antecedent preference. It is only in the demonstrative condition that a clear object bias was obtained with all four groups. I accounted for the observed delay in terms of an insufficient grasp of the relevant discourse properties, as a result of bilingualism effects.
