Prediction on the basis of gender and number in Mandarin-Italian bilingual children

Jasmijn E. Bosch, Mathilde Chailleux, Jia'En Yee, Maria Teresa Guasti, Fabrizio Arosio

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingChapterAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

The present study used a visual world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate online processing of grammatical gender and number in Mandarin-Italian bilingual children, in comparison to monolingual Italian children. We examined how children anticipated upcoming nouns on the basis of grammatical gender and number information on the preceding article. While monolingual speakers are able to employ such predictive mechanisms from a very young age, to our knowledge, this is the first study that compares gender and number processing in bilingual children. The results show that, overall, participants made linguistic predictions on the basis of articles, although a post-hoc analysis focusing on a subset of our bilingual participants did not confirm the prediction effect in Mandarin-Italian bilingual children. We found a greater difference in the bilingual group than in the monolingual group, in that bilinguals tended to be slower when processing gender than number. Finally, we found that L2 proficiency had a significant effect on gender processing in the bilingual group. One interpretation of these findings is that the discrepancy between gender and number may be due to transfer, since Mandarin does not have grammatical gender while it does have a conceptual notion of number. Another factor may be L2 proficiency, and especially lexical knowledge, since gender is an arbitrary property stored in the lexicon, while number is concretely linked to the referential context.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationStudies in Bilingualism
EditorsD. Ayoun
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company
Pages243-271
ISBN (Electronic)9789027258397
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

NameStudies in Bilingualism
ISSN (Print)0928-1533

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No 765556, as a part of the MultiMind project. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska Curie grant agreement No 765556, as a part of the MultiMind project.

FundersFunder number
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme765556
Horizon 2020

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