Portuguese as a Heritage Language in contact with German and French: a comparative study on the acquisition of verbal mood

This study focuses on the acquisition of verbal mood in complement clauses by two groups of heritage speakers of European Portuguese (EP) (7-16 years) with similar sociolinguistic profiles and two different dominant languages, German and French. The production of finite complement clauses was elicit...

ver descrição completa

Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor principal: Flores, Cristina (author)
Outros Autores: Santos, Ana Lúcia (author), Almeida, Letícia (author), Jesus, Alice (author), Marques, Rui (author)
Formato: bookPart
Idioma:eng
Publicado em: 2018
Assuntos:
Texto completo:http://hdl.handle.net/10451/34958
País:Portugal
Oai:oai:repositorio.ul.pt:10451/34958
Descrição
Resumo:This study focuses on the acquisition of verbal mood in complement clauses by two groups of heritage speakers of European Portuguese (EP) (7-16 years) with similar sociolinguistic profiles and two different dominant languages, German and French. The production of finite complement clauses was elicited through a sentence completion task. By comparing two bilingual groups with different dominant languages (a Romance language with a subjunctive mood encoding the same semantic values as EP and a Germanic language with no similar linguistic category), we discuss the relative weight of cross-linguistic influence and of amount of exposure in bilingual acquisition. The results show protracted development of both bilingual groups concerning the subjunctive, with no negative effect observed in the bilingual speakers who are dominant in German. We conclude that cross-linguistic influence cannot explain this performance and suggest that amount of input plays a role.