Complex syntactic structures in the heritage language vs. the majority language: A comprehension study with Romanian-German bilinguals
Complex syntactic structures in the heritage language vs. the majority language: A comprehension study with Romanian-German bilinguals

Summary/Abstract: This study investigated the comprehension of subject and object which-questions in both the heritage language (Romanian) and the societal language (German) of eighteen bilingual children with ages between five and eleven. Using an offline picture-matching task, the study assessed whether the bilingual children use morphological cues, like differential object marking, case marking, and number agreement to overcome the difficulties associated with the comprehension of object which-questions even in monolingual acquisition (Bentea 2017, Friedmann et al. 2009, Roesch & Chondrogianni 2016). The study shows that the Romanian-German bilingual children exhibit a subject-object asymmetry in both their heritage and societal language. However, children appear to use morphological cues differently. In Romanian, the differential object marker did not eliminate comprehension difficulties and a number mismatch did not significantly impact offline interpretation. In contrast, in German, case marking, but not number, played a significant facilitative role, especially when marked on both noun phrases.

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