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given this background information Multiple wh-interrogatives in child heritage Romanian: On-line comprehension and production This study compared the online comprehension and the production of multiple interrogatives in 18 Romanian-English bilingual children aged 6;0-9;2 living in the UK who have Romanian as heritage language (L1) and English as majority language (L2) and 32 Romanian monolingual children aged 6;11 to 9;8. We examined whether differences emerge between heritage and monolingual children in the online comprehension and in the production of multiple interrogatives in Romanian, which requires fronting of all wh-phrases, contrary to English. The main aim was to uncover to which extent similarities or differences in morphosyntactic properties between the L1 and the L2 systems affect the acquisition and processing of the heritage language/L1. Online comprehension was assessed in a self-paced listening task, while production was assessed using an elicitation task. The results reveal that Romanian heritage children show similar online comprehension patterns to monolingual children for multiple interrogatives in Romanian. A different pattern emerges for production as heritage children produce less complex multiple questions in Romanian and avoid movement of two wh-phrases in all elicited structures. Given that their predominant responses for multiple interrogatives only make use of the structural option present in English, namely one fronted wh-phrase and one in-situ, we take this to show that there is transfer from the majority language to the heritage language. Thus, language production in the children's L1 seems to be affected by properties of the dominant L2, under cross-linguistic influence. Taken together, the results for both comprehension and production suggest that heritage children are able to establish the underlying representation of multiple wh-movement structures, similarly to monolinguals, but have difficulties activating the more complex structure in production. Introduction Various studies on heritage language (HL) acquisition have investigated the end-state grammars of adult HL speakers and have shown that they are highly heterogeneous in terms of first language (L1) acquisition outcomes and typically diverge from monolinguals in their L1 when tested in offline comprehension and production. This variability resembles that often found among second language (L2) learners, although L1 exposure starts from birth. In contrast, few studies have focused on exploring how HL grammatical knowledge is accessed and implemented during on-line language processing and even less is known about online language processing in HL children, children who speak a language that is different from the dominant societal language. The present study aims to bring further insights into HL development in child heritage speakers by comparing the performance of Romanian heritage children with L2 English to L1 Romanian-speaking children raised monolingually using both on-line comprehension and production tasks. In order to better understand how differences in surface syntactic structure between the heritage and the dominant societal language affect HL development, we examined whether heritage children pattern similarly to monolingual children on the real-time processing and the production of various types of multiple wh-questions, which display different syntactic properties in the heritage language, Romanian, and in the societal language, English: while Romanian fronts both wh-words, English, only fronts one wh-word, the second one remaining in situ. By investigating performance under different modalities, we aimed to get a more straightforward glimpse at the nature of the differences between child heritage speakers and child monolingual L1 speakers and how this relates to cross-linguistic influence. The paper is organized as follows. We first review previous studies on cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children with a focus on HL development. Then we present the properties of multiple wh-questions in Romanian and the findings for the acquisition of these structures in monolingual children. We conclude the introductory section with the research questions and predictions of the current study. We proceed with the presentation of participants, methods, and procedure. We then present the results, followed by discussion and conclusion. Rewrite the text as a newspaper article reporting on the findings of the study. Include a catchy headline and provide a concise summary of the research, highlighting the key findings and their implications for heritage language development.

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Hugging Face

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