Bradley Hoot

Despite the surge, investigating how information structure is acquired remains in its early stages, with uneven coverage across populations and languages. As shown in Figure 2, the representation of individual languages in our survey follows a power-law distribution, with 52% of the articles focusing on just four languages. Only 25% of articles in our sample include at least one term related to acquisition or bilingualism.foot_0 The contributions to this research topic address these lacunae by expanding the cross-linguistic scope, incorporating data from child L1 acquirers, L2 and heritage bilinguals, and contexts of societal multilingualism, and utilizing both traditional and innovative methods.Lozano and Quesada use CEDEL2 corpus texts to examine anaphora resolution in Spanish native speakers and English-speaking Spanish learners. Their findings challenge the Position of Antecedent Strategy (Carminati, 2002) as the default strategy, showing anaphora resolution is more complex than experimental data suggests, with overt pronouns rarely used and often substituted by repeated noun phrases.Uth, Gutiérrez-Bravo, and Fleissbach demonstrate, using an oral production task and a corpus study, that focus in Yucatec Maya is incompatible with progressive aspect marking. Appealing to a semantic account, they argue that progressive aspect blocks focus fronting because the marker itself functions as a type of focalization.Seraye Alseraye examines how incomplete speech representations affect processing of garden path sentences in L2 Arabic, finding faster reading times in unambiguous contexts and when disambiguating segmental information is present. Overall comprehension remained unaffected, even in the presence of incorrect disambiguating information. The study supports the 'good-enough' model of language processing (Ferreira, et al., 2009) among L2 learners of an understudied language.Slioussar and Harchevnik explore how L1 Russian speakers and Mandarin Chinese L2 Russian learners process SVO and OVS word orders. Using online (reading times) and offline (sentence ratings) tasks, they show that both groups benefit from given-before-new structures, although L2 learners struggle more with processing non-canonical word orders and are less sensitive to discourse constraints.Lorenzen, Roessig, and Baumann employ a novel paradigm-an interactive reading task-to increase the ecological validity of spoken data. They examine how information status affects prosodic prominence in German, finding that paradigmatic effects appear mainly in F0, while syntagmatic effects vary across speakers and depend on the specific acoustic parameter.Destruel, Lalande, and Chen investigate the acquisition of French prosody using a virtual robot-mediated picture-matching task. Unlike younger children, 7-to 8-year-olds and adults use prosody to distinguish focus from non-focus. Furthermore, this study finds subject-object asymmetries, attributed to the dominant use of syntactic strategies for subject focus in French.Yang, Cho, Kim, and Chen examine how young children acquire prosodic phrasing to mark focus in Korean. Using a picture-matching task, they find that children (ages 4-5) pattern like adults in distinguishing narrow from broad focus and prefocal material, but not from postfocal material or contrastive focus. By age 11, patterns are adult-like, with acquisition speed linked to form-meaning transparency.Smeets uses two tasks to test clitic-doubled left dislocation in Romanian, which has received less attention than other Romance languages. The finding that L1 Romanian speakers who learned L2 Italian show attrition-unlike those who learned L2 English-highlights the role of L1-L2 similarity in reshaping L1 information structure via feature reassembly.Luchkina, Ionin, and Goldshtein used two aural identification tasks (with and without contexts) to investigate how English-Russian heritage bilinguals process Russian non-contrastive focus, examining constituent order and prosodic cues. While higher-proficiency heritage speakers patterned with native speakers, the group overall tended to assign focus to nouns with nuclear stress in SVO orders-unlike native speakers-which highlights the challenges external interface structures pose (Sorace, 2011).Neocleous and Sitaridou examine information-structural reflexes of contact between VO and OV languages. Romeyka, an Asia-Minor Greek variety (VO), has coexisted alongside Turkish (OV) for centuries. As a result, left peripheral configurations like focus movement occur in a wider range of contexts than in other Greek varieties.Each article fills the literature gaps we identified, offering directions for future research to build on. At the methodological level, a key desideratum in information structure research is to improve the ecological validity of data, minimizing lab speech artefacts. Several contributions address this by proposing novel experimental designs (e.g., Lorenzen, Roessig, and Baumann) or combining experimental and observational research (e.g., Uth, Gutiérrez-Bravo, and Fleissbach). We envision future studies in which these avenues will be further pursued.Another major challenge in studying information structure is disentangling the roles of different linguistic layers involved in its expression. The interplay between syntax and prosody in particular is central to several contributions. Destruel, Lalande, and Chen examine the syntax-prosody complementarity in French focus expression, while Luchkina, Ionin, and Goldshtein investigate how prosodic and syntactic cues contribute to focus processing in Russian. We see a continued need for such nuanced, multi-layered approaches to the cross-linguistic inventory encoding these distinctions.Finally, studying different populations beyond literate adult monolinguals-such as naturalistic and instructed bilinguals, L1 acquirers at different stages, and speakers of vernacular varieties-is imperative to understanding how...

Bilingual grammars differ systematically from those of monolinguals, but not all areas are affected equally. One linguistic feature that has been claimed to be especially vulnerable to divergence in bilinguals is information structure, which includes constructions in which speakers adapt sentences to the discourse context by manipulating syntax or prosody to mark certain constituents as prominent. A constituent expressing new information, called the focus of the sentence, may be realized in a prominent position like the right or left edge (e.g., ¿Quién tosió? Tosió [Juan]F. ‘Who coughed? [Juan]Fcoughed.’). Research on focus expression in bilingual grammars has expanded substantially in the past three decades, with data from Spanish playing a key role. As the evidence accumulates, it may now be fruitful for the field to pause and take stock of our progress. The goal of this paper is to review the current state of research on focus realization in bilingual Spanish. I synthesize this growing body of scholarship, examining 41 quantitative or experimental studies of the realization of the information-structural category of focus. I conclude that (a) the bulk of the evidence suggests information focus in Spanish does not in fact present special difficulty for bilinguals, regardless of speaker background or methods; (b) the evidence is more mixed for contrastive focus, although many studies find it can be acquired; and (c) where differences are found, prosody may be the area most vulnerable to cross-linguistic influence. After examining the evidence, I make several recommendations for future research.

Heritage speakers—bilinguals who acquire minority languages naturalistically in infancy but are typically majority-language-dominant in adulthood—generally acquire grammars that differ systematically from thebaselineinput received in childhood. Yet not all areas diverge equally; understanding what characterizes divergence or resilience of a given feature is crucial to understanding heritage language acquisition. In this realm, we investigate the discourse-conditioned non-canonical word orders that markinformation focusin Spanish. Focus bears the hallmarks of structures that diverge from the baseline, yet the evidence is mixed. We use an offline forced-choice task and an online self-paced reading task to compare heritage speakers’ judgments and processing to the baseline’s, and we find, echoing recent work, that the heritage speakers largely resemble baseline speakers. We interpret this convergence with reference to seven factors potentially affecting heritage language acquisition and identify one hypothesis—that focus facilitates processing due to its structural and pragmatic salience—as a promising explanation.

Although a bilingual’s knowledge of one language can affect the other, crosslinguistic influence (CLI) is constrained: certain domains, such as the syntax-discourse interface, are more likely to be affected. Linguists have debated CLI’s nature and cause: the Structural Overlap Hypothesis identifies surface overlap between the languages as the key factor determining CLI, while the Interface Hypothesis highlights the role of processing overloads. Our study presents evidence from processing and judgments of a syntax-discourse interface property – information focus – in the Spanish of Yucatecan Spanish monolinguals, Yucatec Maya-Spanish bilinguals, and Catalan-Spanish bilinguals. The comparison across language dyads that realize information focus in different ways allows us to test predictions for language-specific effects of CLI. Using a forced-choice task to measure offline sentence preferences and a self-paced reading task to measure real-time processing, we find (i) language-specific CLI for Yucatec Maya bilinguals but (ii) no CLI for Catalan bilinguals and (iii) no significant differences in real-time processing. We conclude that these results provide partial support for the Structural Overlap Hypothesis but do not align with the Interface Hypothesis. We also examine the role of language dominance on CLI but find no such effects.

The that-trace effect is the fact that many languages (like English) ban the extraction of embedded-clause subjects but not objects over an overt complementizer like that, while many other languages (like Spanish) allow such extractions. The effect and its cross-linguistic variation have been the subject of intense research but remain largely a mystery, with no clear consensus on their underpinnings. We contribute novel evidence to these debates by using Spanish–English code-switching (the use of two languages in one sentence) to test five contemporary theoretical accounts of the that-trace effect. We conducted a formal acceptability judgment experiment, manipulating the extracted argument and code-switch site to test different combinations of linguistic features. We found that subject extraction is only permitted in Spanish–English code-switching when both the C head (que ‘that’) and the T head (i.e., the verb) are in Spanish, but not when either functional head is in English. Our results demonstrate indirect support for two of the five theories we test, failing to support the other three. Our findings also provide new evidence in favor of the view that the that-trace effect is tightly linked to the availability of post-verbal subjects. Finally, we outline how our results can narrow the range of possible theoretical accounts, demonstrating how code-switching data can contribute to core questions in linguistic theory.

Some languages have a fixed subject position, while others are more flexible. Languages like English require pre-verbal subjects; languages like Spanish allow subjects in postverbal position. Because this difference clusters with several linguistic properties distinguishing the two languages, subjects in Spanish and English have been a perennial issue in linguistic theory, touching central problems like the EPP, the nature of cross-linguistic variation, and the relationship between core functional heads. Our project contributes a novel source of evidence to these debates: Spanish/English code-switching. Code-switching, the use of two languages in one utterance, combines the languages’ lexical items and their attendant syntactic features in a single derivation. Because code-switching, like all natural language, is rule-governed, researchers can exploit judgments about the well-formedness of code-switched sentences to draw conclusions about the combinations of features they represent. We report on a formal judgment experiment testing subject position in Spanish/English code-switching as a function of the presence of two functional heads known (from monolingual evidence) to affect subject placement: the C(omplementizer) and T(ense) heads. By manipulating which head appears in which language, we test the availability of post-verbal subjects under different feature combinations. Our results show that post-verbal subjects are only available when both C and T are in Spanish; neither Spanish head alone is sufficient. This finding suggests that the features regulating subject position stem from neither head alone, which is problematic for traditional approaches to the EPP as a feature of T but in line with other recent research on null subjects.

This project examines whether heritage speakers of Spanish distinguish when Spanish clitic-doubled left dislocation (CLLD) is discursively appropriate via an acceptability judgment task (AJT) and a speeded production task (SPT). This two-task experimental design is intended to determine whether heritage speakers diverge from an L1 Spanish/L2 English baseline and, if so, whether such divergence is due to their grammatical knowledge, processing constraints, or other task effects. The baseline group accepted and produced CLLD significantly more than other constructions in anaphoric contexts, with the opposite pattern in non-anaphoric contexts, as expected for Spanish. The heritage speakers showed the same significant differences in production in both conditions and in the AJT’s anaphoric condition; in the non-anaphoric condition, however, they did not show any differences between CLLD and the other relevant constructions. We argue that this group of heritage speakers knows the discursive distribution of CLLD just as the baseline speakers do, as attested by the similar performance pattern in production. Furthermore, we posit that their AJT performance, which shows evidence of overextension of CLLD beyond its anaphoric context and into non-anaphoric contexts, may be due to the metalinguistic nature of AJTs.

This project examines whether second-language (L2) learners can converge on a native-like pattern at the interface between syntax and discourse under low and high processing pressure, using Spanish clitic-doubled left dislocation (CLLD) as a test case. The original version of the Interface Hypothesis (IH) predicts that L2 competence on syntax-discourse interface structures may diverge from that of L1 speakers , yet there is experimental evidence of native-like offline judgments of clitic-doubling and its correlation to relevant discourse contexts in L2 Spanish. However, the most updated version of the IH argues that problems at the syntax-discourse interface are not due to divergent competence but rather to L2 processing limitations. To isolate the potential source of divergence, in the present study L2 Spanish learners completed an Acceptability Judgment Task (low processing pressure) and a Speeded Production Task (high processing pressure). Group results show convergence on the native-like pattern on the Acceptability Judgment Task and divergence on the Speeded Production Task. The first finding suggests that L2 learners have linguistic knowledge of discourse-related clitic-doubling, challenging the original version of the IH. The second finding suggests that the processing pressure induced by time constraints and production is correlated with L2 divergence, as predicted by the new version of the IH. We conclude by considering whether this divergence is most appropriately attributed to processing at the interfaces or could alternatively be explained as a result of real-time production specifically.