Speaker: Holger Hopp

Title: How permeable are native and non-native syntactic processing to crosslinguistic influence?

Time: 15:00 – 16:30, Wed, 2 June 2021 

           (Beijing, Hong Kong time)

Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638

            https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638

About the speaker

Holger Hopp is Professor of English Linguistics at the Technische Universität Braunschweig (Germany). In his research, he investigates child and adult L2/3 acquisition and processing as well as heritage language acquisition and attrition. He uses several psycholinguistic methods to determine the directionality, scope and degree of cross-linguistic influence in bi- and multilingual speakers of different ages. He is an Executive Editor of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism and has published widely on various topics related to multilingualism. 

How permeable are native and non-native syntactic processing to crosslinguistic influence?

Holger Hopp

English and American Studies, University of Braunschweig (Germany)

Recent approaches to bilingual language processing argue that a bilingual's languages are fundamentally permeable, with cross-linguistic influence (CLI) affecting both the L2 and the L1 (e.g. Birdsong, 2018; Kroll et al., 2015). In this talk, I explore the boundary conditions of crosslanguage permeability in syntactic processing among late bilinguals, testing CLI both from the first language (L1) to the second language (L2) and from the L2 to the L1. I will discuss findings from three experiments with four groups of German-English and English-German bilinguals, showing that order of acquisition, but not usage and immersion in the second language, constrains CLI in the processing of structurally ambiguous wh-questions in German. Whereas CLI from the L1 persistently affected L2 sentence processing even among near-native and immersed L2 users, L1 processing was resilient against influence from the L2, even after long-term L2 immersion. The study highlights how systematic and bidirectional investigations of CLI contribute towards more nuanced models of the bilingual mind.

Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: 

(https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html)