Another look at the interpretation of overt and null pronominal subjects in bilingual language acquisition: Heritage Portuguese in contact with German and Spanish

Abstract

This paper investigates the interpretation of overt and null subject pronouns in the heritage language (European Portuguese, EP) of Portuguese heritage bilinguals (children and teenagers) in Germany and Andorra with German (Ger) and Spanish/Catalan (Span/Cat) as environmental languages and compares it to the outcomes of age-matched monolingual Portuguese children and monolingual adults. The results of an offline sentence interpretation task show that all groups of speakers differentiate between overt and null subjects. They are also sensitive to the syntactic context (intrasentential vs. intersentential) and the directionality of the anaphoric relation (anaphoric vs. cataphoric), although to different degrees. We argue that the interpretation of differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers needs to take into account these different syntactic contexts of pronominal resolution in order to gain a better understanding of the role of language-internal factors and cross-linguistic influence (CLI). With respect to the latter, the comparison between the Ger-EP and the Span/Cat-EP groups reveals no differences between these populations and shows that for the speakers’ knowledge of anaphora resolution in EP it is not decisive whether the contact language is a null subject language or not (confirming thus the results in Sorace et al. 2009).