Dear all,

Join us on March 6th (Wednesday) (instead of February 21st) at 17:00 ΕΕΤ for a CAT Lab talk by Dr. Aikaterini Pantoula (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens). The title of the talk is ‘Individual factors in the processing of Greek contrastive focus by Greek heritage language children’. An abstract can be found below.

The talk will take place online, at the Microsoft Teams platform. To join the meeting click here.

Individual factors in the processing of Greek contrastive focus by Greek heritage language children

Recent research on child bilingualism has shown that heritage language children have difficulties with constructions in the syntax external interface (e.g., Daskalaki et al., 2019, 2020, 2022), structures with non-canonical argument order (e.g., Hao & Chondrogianni, 2023; Janssen & Meir, 2019; Meir et al., 2017, 2020), and focus (Laleko, 2021; Polinsky & Scontras, 2020). Although there are some studies on how Greek heritage language children comprehend complex syntactic structures in real-time, to this end no study has investigated the processing of sentences with narrow focus. In this talk, I will present the goals of the FIHELaD project. The aim of this project is to investigate how Greek-German bilingual children who speak Greek as their heritage or as their minority language process narrow focus and how person-level factors (i.e., internal, proximal, distal) affect dual language development in the home (i.e., minority) and environment (i.e., majority) language. To this end, we have designed an experimental protocol to examine the ease of on the time-course incremental processing of Greek declarative sentences with contrastive focus comprising: (a) questionnaires collecting information on individual-level factors and (b) an eye tracking visual-world-paradigm experimental task