Session 6G

Research indicates potential asymmetries between receptive-expressive modalities for HL vocabulary and grammar (Gibson et al. 2012; Pourquié et al. 2019). Development of literacy skills and HL education in dual immersion may compensate, as HL and L2 learners have demonstrated (Montrul & Potowski 2007).Polinsky and Scontras (2020) propose a bilingualism model whereby core morphosyntax is resilient in HL, but may be stronger in comprehension than production; less core morphology may be problematic for HL and L2. In order to examine the receptive-expressive gap in asymmetric bilinguals and to extend the literature on child bilingualism, we examine verb inflection from HL/L2 children (9-10 years) in dual immersion Spanish-English.

By age 10, children in majority Spanish environment show full receptive-expressive mastery of present tense morphology, unlike HL/L2 peers showing variable verb inflection (Silva Corvalán 2018). The current study tested HL and L2 children-whose results on earlier four-skills standardized tests indicated writing and listening as areas of interest-using oral comprehension (OCT) and written production to compare two modalities. Participants were 62 Spanish-English children (21 HL, 41 L2; 50:50 two-way immersion). For the OCT, students viewed 20 pairs of photographs showing one or two persons performing an action and chose the correct photograph based on oral comprehension of singular-plural. There were two production tasks, a form-focused task (FFPT) that tested children's written production of 10 verbs in singular-plural in response to photo cues similar to the OCT. The second was an open task, focused on meaning (MFPT), an email to a new pen-pal. 

The HL group showed high accuracy on number morphology in all three tasks, (94% OCT, 92% FFPT, 96% MFPT). Differences between the first two were not significant (Wilcoxon signed rank tests. V = 94, p = .717): for HL speakers receptive skills of singular-plural present tense did not exceed written production ability. L2 learners (82% OCT, 73% FFPT, 91% MFPT) were significantly less accurate than HL children in the FFPT (W = 586, p = .016) and OCT (W = 601, p = .008). Differences between OCT and FFPT were not significant (V = 442.5, p = .084). In other words, HL and L2 speakers showed production abilities that were comparable to their comprehension skills in present tense with no gap for number morphology.

HL children show no attrition of early-learned present tense, and L2 participants have a relatively good command of it (albeit lower than HL). Both groups show no receptive-expressive gap, suggesting that continuing academic training has a beneficial effect for both HL and L2 children. 

References
Montrul & Potowski. 2007. Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism (IJB) 11: 301-328.
Polinsky & Scontras. 2020. Understanding heritage languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 23: 4-20.
Pourquié et al. 2019. Investigating vulnerabilities in grammatical processing of bilinguals. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9: 600-627.
Silva-Corvalan. 2018. Simultaneous bilingualism: Early developments, incomplete later outcomes. IJB 22: 497-512.

In many languages, including English and most Romance varieties, the future tense forms (FUT) can receive conjectural interpretations, unrelated to future time reference. However, crosslinguistically different Aktionsart restrictions apply. Furthermore, conjectural FUT may appear in concessive environments in Spanish and Italian, but not in French and English. We consider, along with Escandell-Vidal (2022), that certain (but not all) core semantic features are common to the FUT tense of all Romance varieties. Conversely, in English, futurity, modality and aspect are closely interrelated, in a different way from that of the Romance languages.
In line with the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2008, 2009), we argue that the L2 learning task consists in re-assembling features, i.e., the learners firstly detect where the features in the L2 are, and secondly, the semantic restrictions under which they operate. Thus, we examine to what extent L1 French, Italian and English learners of L2 Spanish at upper intermediate and advanced levels (CEFR B2 and C1) can interpret and produce L2 combinations of semantic features that differ from their L1 in the degree to which they facilitate or restrict conjectural FUT. Other related questions we address are: to what extent do the L2 grammatical judgments rest on the L1 linguistic competence? Are L2 learners capable of detecting operational constraints in a combination of certain features of the L2, when they differ from those of L1? Is there progression in this re-assembly process as learners gain greater general proficiency in the L2? 
We present results of two linguistic tasks probing the acceptability of conjectural simple and compound FUT forms, completed by L1 French, Italian and English learners of L2 Spanish, at CEFR B2 and C1 levels (N= 20 per level and L1), and by 29 monolingual European Spanish speaker controls. The tasks consisted of 1) an acceptability judgement task targeting lexical aspect feature violation in conjectural and concessive FUT and 2) a judgement task contrasting the acceptability of simple FUT vs. compound FUT. Our findings provide a fine-grained description of the semantic representation and access of interpretable features in L2 Spanish, in order to better understand how L2 learners cope with the cross-language presence of two different, albeit "similar", language systems.
REFERENCES
Escandell-Vidal, V. (2022). The simple future in Romance. Core meaning and parametric variation. In Baranzini, L., De Saussure, L. (eds.). Aspects of Tenses, Modality, and Evidentiality. Cahiers Chronos 31. Leiden: Brill, 9-31.
Lardiere, D. (2008). Feature-Assembly in Second Language in Second Language Acquisition. In: Liceras, J., Zobl, H., Goodluck, H. (eds.) Features in Second Language Acquisition. Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum, 106-140.
Lardiere, D. (2009). Some thoughts on a contrastive analysis of feature in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 25.2, 173–227. 

Extensive research on the beginning stages of language learning by untutored learners reveals little to no productive morphology (Perdue 1993). Other research, even with tutored learners, has found similar results (Bardovi-Harlig 1992; Larsen-Freeman 2010; VanPatten 2004). However, despite this difficulty, learners can develop sensitivity to the morphological forms of the target language (TL) very early, after a few hours of exposure to the L2 as shown by Rast et al. (2014). To what extent is this lack of productive morphology due to the type of linguistic input learners receive with respect to frequency and typological distance between L1 and L2? A complete control of the learners' linguistic environment from the moment of first exposure to the foreign language can contribute to answering this question. This paper reports on such a study, in which French is the source language and Polish and Modern Standard Arabic are the target languages. 
Groups of 17 native speakers of French learning TL Polish and 11 native speakers of French learning TL Arabic took part in a Polish and Arabic course respectively. They received oral input from native-speaking instructors. The input frequency was carefully controlled and documented in order to compare learner performance with properties of the input.
This paper presents cross-linguistic results of an oral production task (question-answer), which tests learners' ability to use inflectional morphology in Polish and Arabic. The task was administered after 4h30 of instruction (after three lessons of 1h30 each). Production data were analyzed for accuracy relative to frequency to see how learners integrated new forms into their individual learner varieties and what helped them to do this. Results shed light on the role of the source language (French) in the early stages of the acquisition of inflectional morphology in Polish and Arabic.
French, a Romance language, is typologically distant from both Polish (a Slavic language) and Arabic (a Semitic language). However, French learners of Polish were able to produce utterances with correct inflection more quickly than those learning Arabic. These results will be discussed relative to frequency and language typology.



Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1992) The relationship of form and meaning: A cross-sectional study of tense and aspect in the interlanguage of learners of English as a second language, Applied Psycholinguistics 13: 253-278. 
Perdue, C. (1993) (Ed) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-linguistic Perspectives, Vol. I and II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rast, R., Watorek, M., Hilton, H. et Shoemaker, E. (2014), "Initial processing and use of inflectional markers: Evidence from French adult learners of Polish", dans Han, Z-H. et Rast, R. (éds.), First Exposure to a Second Language: Learners' Initial Input Processing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 64-106.
Slobin, D. I. (1985). Crosslinguistic evidence for the language-making capacity. In D. I. Slobin (Ed.) The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, Vol. 2. Theoretical Issues. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1157-1256. 
VanPatten, B. (2004) Input processing in second language acquisition. In B. VanPatten (Ed), Processing Instruction: Theory, Research, and Commentary (5-31). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates