ABSTRACT

This study addresses the question of how age of acquisition (AoA) affects grammatical processing, specifically with respect to inflectional morphology, in bilinguals. We examined experimental data of more than 100 participants from the Russian/German community in Berlin, all of whom acquired Russian from birth and German at different ages. Using the cross-modal lexical priming technique, we investigated stem allomorphs of German verbs that encode multiple morphosyntactic features. The results revealed a striking AoA modulation of observed priming patterns, indicating efficient access to morphosyntactic features for early AoAs and a gradual decline with increasing AoAs. In addition, we found a discontinuity in the function relating AoA to morphosyntactic feature access, suggesting a sensitive period for the development of morphosyntax.

摘要

这项研究解决了双语者中习得年龄（AoA）如何影响语法处理的问题，特别是在屈折形态方面。我们检查了来自柏林俄罗斯/德国社区的100多名参与者的实验数据，他们全部都是从出生时就获得了俄语，并从不同年龄获得了德语。使用交叉模式词汇启动技术，我们研究了编码多个形态句法特征的德语动词的词干同素异形词。结果表明，观察到的启动图样具有惊人的AoA调制，表明早期AoA可以有效使用形态句法特征，并且随着AoA的增加而逐渐下降。此外，我们发现与AoA关联到句法句法特征访问的功能不连续，这提示了吗啡句法发展的敏感时期。