Non-canonical questions in early and late bilingual language acquisition

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Successful comprehension and production of Rhetorical Questions (RQs) involves access to prosodic, lexical, and contextual cues, which differ across languages, as well as Theory of Mind. Therefore, they provide the opportunity to investigate how access to these cues changes over time as children develop their language and cognitive abilities and whether bilingual children and adults have different coding strategies in each of their languages and it relation to monolinguals. This project investigates for the first time systematically how bilingual and monolingual children and adults acquire RQs. Using a combination of perception, comprehension, and production tasks, the first set of objectives addresses whether bilinguals are able to perceive the difference between Information Seeking Questions (ISQs) and RQs on the basis of prosodic cues and lexical cues (discourse particles), whether they can use these cues to comprehend RQs and whether they can use these cues in their own production. The second set of objectives addresses the acquisition of RQ in different dimensions of bilingualism; it compares the acquisition of RQs in bilinguals’ majority language (German) to their minority/heritage language (Italian) and it makes inferences about the roles of age (and general cognitive abilities), age of onset, length and type of exposure and input, proficiency in the two languages in contact (German and Italian), acquisition of irony (in German and Italian), and Theory of Mind (in German and Italian). By comparing adult early vs. adult late learners of German, it addresses effects of age of onset and relative proficiency in German. Since research on the acquisition of RQs has been extremely limited, the present programme will fill a research gap.