دورية أكاديمية
Rhetorical Question Comprehension by Italian-German Bilingual Children
العنوان: | Rhetorical Question Comprehension by Italian-German Bilingual Children |
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اللغة: | English |
المؤلفون: | Miriam Geiss (ORCID |
المصدر: | Second Language Research. 2024 40(2):221-246. |
الإتاحة: | SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: https://sagepub.com |
Peer Reviewed: | Y |
Page Count: | 26 |
تاريخ النشر: | 2024 |
نوع الوثيقة: | Journal Articles Reports - Research |
Education Level: | Elementary Education |
Descriptors: | Questioning Techniques, Italian, Bilingualism, Elementary School Students, Intonation, Suprasegmentals, Cues, Native Language, Second Language Learning, Task Analysis, Language Processing, Syntax, Language Proficiency, Language Dominance, German, Language Acquisition, Foreign Countries |
مصطلحات جغرافية: | Germany |
DOI: | 10.1177/02676583221140861 |
تدمد: | 0267-6583 1477-0326 |
مستخلص: | This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and lexical-syntactic cues. Being childhood learners, children have to acquire the concept of rhetoricity, but being bilinguals, they further need to acquire the different cues marking RhQs in their two languages. We tested 85 bilingual children (aged 6-9 years) with Italian as heritage language (HL) and German as majority language (ML) in both of their languages, using a forced-choice comprehension task. Our results show that RhQ comprehension improves with age in both languages. Bilingual children are able to exploit prosodic and syntactic cues to comprehend RhQs in their ML and HL with a slight advantage in the ML. This advantage could be either an effect of the cues used in the experiments in the two languages or of a higher proficiency in the ML. In addition, our results point to a later acquisition of prosodic rhetorical cues, which has implications for bilingual acquisition of non-canonicity in general. |
Abstractor: | As Provided |
Entry Date: | 2024 |
رقم الأكسشن: | EJ1420816 |
قاعدة البيانات: | ERIC |
تدمد: | 0267-6583 1477-0326 |
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DOI: | 10.1177/02676583221140861 |