24.974, Diss: Lang Acq/ Psycholing/ Typology: Engemann: 'Motion Event Expression in Bilingual First Language Acquisition'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-974. Mon Feb 25 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.974, Diss: Lang Acq/ Psycholing/ Typology: Engemann: 'Motion Event Expression in Bilingual First Language Acquisition'

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Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2013 11:05:26
From: Helen Engemann [helen.engemann at sfl.cnrs.fr]
Subject: Motion Event Expression in Bilingual First Language Acquisition

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Institution: Cambridge University 
Program: PhD in Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2012 

Author: Helen Engemann

Dissertation Title: Motion Event Expression in Bilingual First Language
Acquisition 

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition
                     Psycholinguistics
                     Typology


Dissertation Director(s):
Henriëtte Hendriks

Dissertation Abstract:

The thesis explores the implications of Talmy’s typology of motion expression 
(Talmy 2000) for bilingual first language acquisition of English (satellite-framing) 
and French (verb-framing), addressing the following question: How does the 
expression of motion develop in simultaneous bilingual children in comparison to 
monolinguals? The particular focus is on the role of crosslinguistic interactions 
and the extent to which their occurrence and directionality are affected by 
language-specific properties, children’s age and task complexity. The thesis 
pursues two goals. First, it aims to contribute to the understanding of the role of 
language-specific factors in the acquisition process (Allen et al. 2007, Choi and 
Bowerman 1991, Hickmann et al. 2009). Secondly, by testing various proposals 
regarding crosslinguistic interactions (Müller and Hulk 2001, Gawlitzek-Maiwald 
and Tracy 1996, Toribio 2004), it endeavours to shed light on bilingual speech 
production processes. 


Oral event descriptions elicited by means of short video clips from bilingual and 
monolingual children aged 4 to 10 years are analysed and compared across two 
production tasks of varying semantic complexity: a simpler voluntary motion 
task, showing agents performing spontaneous movements along various paths, 
and a more complex caused motion task, portraying a human agent causing the 
displacement of various objects in different manners along various paths. 
Bilinguals' event descriptions are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively in 
relation to monolingual English and French control groups across various 
aspects of verbalisation: (i) the linguistic devices used for information encoding 
(information packaging), (ii) the number of information components expressed 
(semantic density), and (iii) their syntactic complexity and compactness 
(utterance architecture). 


The results indicate both parallels and differences to monolingual performance 
patterns. Although bilinguals’ event descriptions generally follow the typological 
tendencies characterising monolinguals’ English and French verbalisation 
tendencies, they also exhibit significant departures from the monolingual range in 
both languages, at all tested ages and in both tasks. However, these differences 
are most prominent in French caused motion expressions. In this task, bilinguals 
display a striking preference for satellite-framing encoding, resulting both in the 
overuse of crosslinguistically overlapping packaging strategies and in 
qualitatively deviant extensions of French locative satellites. Syntactically, 
bilinguals show a strong tendency to use compact structures compared to 
French monolinguals. An unexpected finding concerns the occurrence of a 
number of divergent production phenomena that are shared by bilinguals’ 
productions in both languages and tasks, and suggest a bilingual-specific pattern 
of use.  


The findings are discussed in the context of recent proposals regarding 
crosslinguistic interactions in simultaneous bilingualism. The persistence of 
bilingual-specific effects even at age 10 suggests that crosslinguistic interactions 
characterise bilinguals’ verbal behaviour throughout development. This supports 
the notion that the bilingual is a unique speaker-hearer in his own right (Grosjean 
2008). With regard to the impact of typological and general determinants, the 
findings indicate that bilinguals’ verbalisation choices are guided by a complex 
interplay of event-specific factors and the perceived overlap of language-specific 
properties of both languages.






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