Non-canonical questions in early and late bilingual language acquisition

成功地理解和产生反问句（RQs）涉及到不同语言的韵律、词汇和语境线索，以及心理理论。因此，他们提供了机会来研究这些线索的获取是如何随着儿童语言和认知能力的发展而变化的，以及双语儿童和成人在每种语言中是否有不同的编码策略，以及它与单语者的关系。本项目首次系统地研究了双语和单语儿童和成人如何获得rq。使用感知、理解和生成任务的组合，第一组目标涉及双语者是否能够根据韵律线索和词汇线索（语篇小品）感知信息搜索问题（isq）和rq之间的差异，他们是否能够使用这些线索来理解rq，以及他们是否能够在自己的生产中使用这些线索。第二组目标从不同的双语维度探讨RQ的习得；它比较了双语者在主要语言（德语）和他们的少数/传统语言（意大利语）中获得的rq，并对年龄（和一般认知能力）、开始的年龄、接触和输入的时间和类型、两种接触语言（德语和意大利语）的熟练程度、反语（德语和意大利语）的获得以及心理理论（德语和意大利语）的作用做出了推断。通过比较成人早期和晚期德语学习者，它解决了年龄和德语相对熟练程度的影响。由于关于获得rq的研究极为有限，本方案将填补研究空白。

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.