CLEAR - Cross-linguistic influence during real-time processing in child heritage speakers

The project CLEAR (Cross-Linguistic influence during real-time procEssing in child heritAge speakeRs) investigates the role of crosslinguistic influence in real-time sentence processing to fill the gap in the ongoing debate about whether languages interact in the mind of a bilingual child. Some argue that the general bilingualism effect, rather than the cross-linguistic influence, affects language comprehension. What is lacking in this field of research, however, is a systematic understanding of what happens in real-time processing. We focus on cross-linguistic influence in pronoun interpretation by testing severely understudied bilingual population, i.e. child heritage speakers of Croatian. We approach the phenomenon in a new and unique way by examining the crosslinguistic influence in relation to the implicit causality bias, which is assumed to facilitate language comprehension. CLEAR takes a novel methodological approach by comparing not only bilinguals and monolinguals, but also bilingual populations. To better understand the phenomenon, both children’s eye movements and offline responses will be measured. CLEAR will make a significant contribution to research on heritage language bilingualism by revealing whether the languages a child acquires influence each other or whether difficulties in language comprehension are due to the general bilingualism effect, i.e. limited processing abilities.

Funding agency: European Commision, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Project number: 101154247 (link to project page on CORDIS)

Call: HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01

Grant amount: € 210 911,04