Let's change the topic! How do late bilinguals process anaphora in stories with and without a topic-shift?
Abstract
The L1 transfer to strategies adopted to resolve anaphora in L2 can influence the late bilinguals' performance in perception of referring expressions. This can be particularly challenging if L1 and L2 use different linguistic cues to grasp discourse relations, like Czech and Dutch.
Czech uses personal pronouns to signal a topic shift. In Dutch, nouns are used to signal such a discourse context, whereas pronouns express mostly the topic continuation.
I investigate perception of anaphora by comparing 27 late Czech-Dutch bilinguals living in the Netherlands, 27 Czech students of Dutch and 27 Dutch native speakers in stories with and without a topic-shift. Different types of immersive settings in which bilinguals use their languages can predict differences in their linguistic performance (Pliatsikas & Chondrogianni, 2015).
Therefore, comparison of two bilingual groups with the same knowledge of Dutch as their L2 but with differences in the linguistic immersive setting, was assessed by a questionnaire. The perception task was to resolve a seemingly ambiguous anaphora at the end of stories with/without a topic-shift.
The L2 users of Dutch made more mistakes in perception task compared to the control group (ANOVA: F = 2,22; p <0.00). The locus of the interaction was the difference between the group of students of Dutch in the non-topic shift condition compared to the control group (t (22) = 2.40; p <.05) but not compared to the bilinguals living in the Netherlands (t (22) = 1.72; p=0.1).
The comparison between bilinguals living in the Netherlands and the control group also revealed significant difference in performance (t(22) = 2.17; p=.04). Results suggest that both groups of Czech-Dutch bilinguals rely on resolution mechanisms from their L1, which surprisingly compromises comprehension of the stories without a topic shift.
Further correlations between levels of immersion and performance in the task will be discussed.