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This thesis investigates whether multilingual speakers’ use of grammatical constraints in an additional language (La) is affected by the native (L1) and non-native grammars (L2) of their linguistic repertoire.
Previous studies have used untimed measures of grammatical performance to show that L1 and L2 grammars affect the initial stages of La acquisition. This thesis extends this work by examining whether speakers at intermediate levels of La proficiency, who demonstrate mature untimed/offline knowledge of the target La constraints, are differentially affected by their L1 and L2 knowledge when they comprehend sentences under processing pressure. With this purpose, several groups of La German speakers were tested on word order and agreement phenomena using online/timed measures of grammatical knowledge. Participants had mirror distributions of their prior languages and they were either L1English/L2Spanish speakers or L1Spanish/L2English speakers. Crucially, in half of the phenomena the target La constraint aligned with English but not with Spanish, while in the other half it aligned with Spanish but not with English. Results show that the L1 grammar plays a major role in the use of La constraints under processing pressure, as participants displayed increased sensitivity to La constraints when they aligned with their L1, and reduced sensitivity when they did not. Further, in specific phenomena in which the L2 and La constraints aligned, increased L2 proficiency resulted in an enhanced sensitivity to the La constraint. These findings suggest that both native and non-native grammars affect how speakers use La grammatical constraints under processing pressure. However, L1 and L2 grammars differentially influence on participants’ performance: While L1 constraints seem to be reliably recruited to cope with the processing demands of real-time La use, proficiency in an L2 can enhance sensitivity to La constraints only in specific circumstances, namely when L2 and La constraints align.
This study investigates the effect of bilingualism on learning English as a foreign language (L3), examining the impact of manner and sequence of bilingual acquisition and learning as well as language use practices in language minority children. With a sample of 1295 German eighth and ninth graders (bilingual: n = 456, monolingual: n = 839), we examined if certain aspects of bilingualism present an advantageous condition for learning English as a foreign language in bilingual language minority students. Controlling for socio-economic status, indicators of cultural capital, and gender, the regression analyses revealed higher L3 listening and reading outcomes for bilinguals who received formal instruction in their minority language, had acquired both languages in their first three years, and switched more often between their two languages, when compared to their other bilingual and monolingual peers. The discussion focuses on the importance for bilingual children in immigrant communities to have high proficiencies in both majority and minority languages in order to develop advantages in foreign language learning.
Previous studies have shown that multilingual speakers are influenced by their native (L1) and non-native (L2) grammars when learning a new language. But, so far, these studies have mostly used untimed metalinguistic tasks. Here we examine whether multilinguals’ prior grammars also affect their sensitivity to morphosyntactic constraints during processing. We use speeded judgment and self-paced reading tasks to examine the comprehension of German possessive pronouns. To investigate whether native and non-native grammars differentially affect participants’ performance, we compare two groups of non-native German speakers with inverse L1–L2 distributions: a group with L1 Spanish – L2 English, and a group with L1 English – L2 Spanish. We show that the reading profiles of both groups are modulated by their L1 grammar, with L2 proficiency selectively affecting participants’ judgment accuracy but not their reading times. We propose that reading comprehension is mainly influenced by multilinguals’ native grammar, but that knowledge of an L2 grammar can further increase sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations in an additional language.