The acquisition of Voice alternations by Greek-German bilingual children

本研究旨在探讨儿童对语音变化的习得。我们的目标是探索双语儿童是如何获得这些语音系统的，他们接触的语言具有不同的形态句法方式来表达语音变化。特别是，我们调查了德国说德语-希腊语的双语儿童习得反身/互补句、无标记和有标记的抗听句以及被动句的情况。由于以前几乎没有关于母语为德语和母语为希腊语的控制组学生习得语音交替的研究，因此本项目旨在调查双语习得之外，还有德语和希腊语的单语习得。对这些语态变化的研究旨在探索独特性假说(Armon-Lotem等人，2016)，即在形式上唯一标记的结构将比未指定的结构更早习得。同样，对于双语习得来说，形式上唯一标记的结构预计会在未指定的结构中迁移，但不会反过来。在方法上，我们的目标是评估和分析我们从纵向和叙述性研究中收集的所有三个组的数据，这三个组包括第一语言德语组、第一语言希腊语组和德希腊语双语组。此外，我们计划完成目前在希腊为L1希腊语进行的引发式生产实验，从2016年10月起在德国对L1德语和德希语双语儿童进行生产试验。

This project aims to investigate the child acquisition of Voice alternations. We aim to explore how bilingual children, who are exposed to languages that have different morpho-syntactic ways to express Voice alternations, acquire these Voice systems. In particular, we investigate the acquisition of reflexives/reciprocals, unmarked and marked anticausatives, and passives by bilingual German-Greek speaking children in Germany. Since very few previous studies are available with regard to the acquisition of Voice alternations by actually the control groups, L1 German and L1 Greek, the project aims to investigate next to the bilingual acquisition also the German and Greek monolingual acquisition. The investigation of these Voice alternations aims to explore the Uniqueness Hypothesis (Armon-Lotem & al., 2016), i.e. the idea that structures uniquely marked in form will be acquired earlier than underspecified structures. Similarly for the bilingual acquisition, uniquely marked structures in form are expected to transfer in the underspecified structures, but not the other way around. Methodologically, we aim to evaluate and analyze the data we collected from both our longitudinal and narrative studies in all three groups, L1 German, L1 Greek and bilingual German-Greek. Additionally, we plan to complete the elicited production experiments we are currently running for L1 Greek in Greece, with L1 German and bilingual German-Greek children from October 2016 in Germany.