| Popis: |
Research literature on bilingual acquisition of the null subject property has focused on the one hand on young children up to the age of 5 and on the other hand on adult heritage speakers. Literature on early school-aged children is scarce. However, Serratrice (2007) and Wolleb (2013) could not detect differences in terms of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) between monolingual Italian children and bilingual Italian-English children at the age of 5 to 8 years. The present paper presents oral data based on semi-structured interviews of Italian-German children (age 6 to 10, mean 8.2 years, n=12) and adult Italian heritage speakers in Germany (age 17 to 43, mean 26.9 years, n=16). We show that the school-aged heritage speakers perform much the same as the adult ones, in both subject expression in total and subject omissions by grammatical person, contrasting findings of CLI in younger bilingual German-Italian children (Schmitz, Patuto, & Müller, 2012). In addition, results show that the children’s subject expression is in most utterances pragmatically felicitous to a degree comparable to the adult HS. Concerning language-external factors, we investigated the influence of speech rate, sex, and age on subject expression and observe that adults vary more with increasing age than the young speakers do. We argue that both investigated groups clearly display native competence in the domain of subject expression. |
