Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian

By A. Sorace, F. Filiaci. 2006

751 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study presents data from an experiment on the interpretation of intrasentential anaphora in Italian by native Italian speakers and by English speakers who have learned Italian as adults and have reached a near-native level of proficiency in this language. The two groups of speakers were presented with complex sentences consisting of a main clause and a subordinate clause, in which the subordinate clause had either an overt pronoun or a null subject pronoun. In half of the sentences the main clause preceded the subordinate clause (forward anaphora) and in the other half the subordinate clause preceded the main clause (backward anaphora). Participants performed in a picture verification task in which they had to indicate the picture(s) that corresponded to the meaning of the subordinate clause, thus identifying the possible antecedents of the null or overt subject pronouns. The patterns of responses of the two groups were very similar with respect to the null subject pronouns in both the forward and backward anaphora conditions. Compared to native monolingual speakers, however, the near-natives had a significantly higher preference for the subject of the matrix clause as a possible antecedent of overt subject pronouns, particularly in the backward anaphora condition. The results indicate that near-native speakers have acquired the syntactic constraints on pronominal subjects in Italian, but may have residual indeterminacy in the interface processing strategies they employ in interpreting pronominal forms.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/95e7fda41dbb84021a681b08b2630aa3b4a12c7a

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Citations in the corpus

Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development: Beyond structural overlap (2009, background): “…(Tsimpli et al., 2004), second language learners (Belletti, Bennati, & Sorace, 2007; Iverson, Kempchinsky, & Rothman, 2008; Rothman, 2007a; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006) and heritage speakers (Montrul, 2002, 2004; Rothman, 2007b) for the use of pronominal subjects, the acquisition of aspectual…”
ONLINE PRONOUN RESOLUTION IN L2 DISCOURSE: L1 Influence and General Learner Effects (2008, background): “…is, they tend to overuse overt pronouns when a native speaker would use a null pronominal, such as when there is no contrast or topic shift ~e+g+, Sorace & Filiaci, 2006!+ Parallel findings have been observed in studies on L1 attrition, with Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish being affected by…”
Coreference and discourse coherence in L2: The roles of grammatical aspect and referential form (2017, background): “Such phenomena have been argued to lead to persistent and possibly permanent L1-L2 differences (Sorace, 2011; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006).”
Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition (2009, background): “This latter kind of problem has been argued as likely to result in ‘residual indeterminacy’ in the learner’s know ledge (or processing) of interface conditions for syntactically-licensed elements whose distribution is pragmatically determined (Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; see also Montrul, 2004b; Serra”
Knowledge of tense-aspect and mood in Spanish heritage speakers (2009, background): “Sorace (2000), Tsimpli et al. (2004), and Sorace and Filiaci (2006) formulated a linguistic hypothesis that specifically relates the selectivity of attrition to the complexity of certain linguistic interfaces, some of which require, for example, the integration of syntax and other…”
Scalar implicatures in second language acquisition (2010, neutral): “In a recent study of anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian, Sorace and Filiaci (2006) put forward the Interface Hypothesis (see also Belleti et al., 2007).”
Crosslinguistic influence at the syntax proper: Interrogative subject–verb inversion in heritage Spanish (2013, background): “In more recent research, Sorace et al. have brought back the discussion of transfer selectivity to the forefront of current language acquisition and bilingualism research (e.g. Serratrice et al., 2004; Sorace, 2000, 2004, 2005; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006).”
How similar are adult second language learners and Spanish heritage speakers? Spanish clitics and word order (2009, methodology): “…that in bilingualism and language contact situations, interface areas between syntax and other cognitive systems, including discourse-pragmatics, exhibit a great deal of developmental instability (Montrul, 2004a; Müller & Hulk, 2001; Sorace, 2004; Sorace & Filiaci 2006; Tsimpli et al., 2004).”
Bilingual children's sensitivity to specificity and genericity: Evidence from metalinguistic awareness* (2009, background): “…the acquisition of Italian by L1 Spanish speakers (Bini 1993), which found similar error patterns for the use of subject pronouns as those observed in L1 English speakers of Italian, despite the equivalence of the pronoun systems in Spanish and Italian (see Sorace and Filiaci, 2006 for discussion).”
Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism (2011, background): “…of optionality at the syntax– pragmatics interface may, in actual fact, reflect differences in processing between bilingual and monolingual speakers, rather than (only) crosslinguistic influence (see Sorace, 2006a; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; and Sorace & Serratrice, 2009) for fuller discussion).”
Understanding heritage languages (2019, background): “…2014; Montrul, 2004; Pérez-Leroux & Glass, 1999; Quesada, 2015; Rothman, 2007b, 2009; Serratrice, Sorace & Paoli, 2004; Sorace, 2011; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; Tsimpli, 2007, 2014; Tsimpli, Sorace, Heycock, Filiaci & Bouba, 2003; White, 1985, among many others); see Keating, Jegerski…”
The syntax–discourse interface in near-native L2 acquisition: Off-line and on-line performance* (2009, background): “(adapted from Sorace and Filiaci, 2006, p. 352) These discourse conditions on the ordering of subjects and the anaphoric reference of subjects in null-subject languages have been found to present difficulty in different bilingual contexts, i.e. bilingual L1 acquisition (Müller and Hulk, 2001;…”
Parsing and Working Memory in Bilingual Sentence Processing (2016, methodology): “This contrast in L2 pronoun resolution was instrumental in the formulation of the interface hypothesis (Sorace, 2011; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006).”
Clitic-doubled left dislocation and focus fronting in L2 Spanish: A case of successful acquisition at the syntax–discourse interface (2012, methodology): “According to Sorace and Filiaci (2006), the IH does not contend that L2ers are a priori unable to acquire target representations for syntax–discourse properties; rather, residual optionality – as evidenced in linguistic performance – arises as a by-product of the extra burden these properties…”