Albirini, Abdulkafi and Elabbas Benmamoun. In Press. Aspects of second language transfer in the oral production of Egyptian and Palestinian heritage speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism.

Published: Wed, 19 Dec 2012

Abstract:

The nature and extent of the impact of language transfer in majority–minority language contexts have been widely debated in both second- and heritage-language acquisition. This study examines four linguistic areas in three oral narratives collected from Egyptian and Palestinian heritage speakers in the United States (namely, plural and dual morphology, possessive constructions, and restrictive relative clauses), with a special focus on how the second language (English) influences the structure and use of these areas in connected discourse. In addition, the study examines the relationship between second-language transfer and the incompleteness and attrition of heritage Arabic. The findings show that heritage speakers have various gaps in their knowledge of the examined areas, particularly in forms and patterns that diverge from their counterparts in their dominant L2. The results also suggest that transfer effects are restricted to specific forms that are marked (e.g. broken plurals), infrequent (duals), or characterized by processing difficulty (as seems to be the case with the dependencies in the relative clauses). Moreover, transfer effects are intimately related to both the attrition and incomplete acquisition of the speakers’ knowledge of the four areas under study. The implications of the study for heritage language research are discussed.

Albirini, Abdulkafi, Elabbas Benmamoun, and Eman Saadah.2011. Grammatical features of Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic Heritage Speakers Oral Production. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33: 273-303.

Published: Wed, 19 Dec 2012

Abstract:

This study presents an investigation of oral narratives collected from heritage Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic speakers living in the United States. The focus is on a number of syntactic and morphological features in their production, such as word order, use of null subjects, selection of prepositions, agreement, and possession. The degree of codeswitching in their narratives was also investigated. The goal was to gain some insights into the Arabic linguistic competence of this group of speakers. The results show that although Arabic heritage speakers display significant competence in their heritage colloquial varieties, there are gaps in that knowledge. There also seems to be significant transfer from English, their dominant language.

Albirini, Abdulkafi, Elabbas Benmamoun, and Brahim Chakrani. 2013. Gender and Number Agreement in the Oral Production of Arabic Heritage Speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 16.1: 1-18

Published: Wed, 19 Dec 2012

Abstract

Heritage language acquisition has been characterized by various asymmetries, including the differential acquisition rates of various linguistic areas and the unbalanced acquisition of different categories within a single area. This paper examines Arabic heritage speakers’ knowledge of subject–verb agreement versus noun–adjective agreement with the aim of contrasting their distributions and exploring areas of resilience and vulnerability within Arabic heritage speech and their theoretical implications. Two oral-production experiments were carried out, one involving two picture-description tasks, and another requiring an elicited narrative. The results of the study show that subject–verb agreement morphology is more maintained than noun–adjective morphology. Moreover, the unmarked singular masculine default is more robust than the other categories in both domains and is often over-generalized to other marked categories. The results thus confirm the existence of these asymmetries. We propose that these asymmetries may not be explained by a single factor, but by a complex set of morphological, syntactic, semantic, and frequency-related factors.

Elabbas Benmamoun and Lina Choueiri. In press. The Syntax of Arabic from a Generative Perspective. Handbook of Arabic Linguistics. Jonathan Owens (ed.). Oxford University Press.

Published: Wed, 19 Dec 2012

Elabbas Benmamoun, Abdulkafi Albirini, Silvina Montrul, and Eman Saadah. To appear. Arabic Plurals and Root and Pattern Morphology in Egyptian and Palestinian Heritage Speakers. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.

Published: Wed, 19 Dec 2012