When attrition leads to redundancy: experimental insights to ambiguity, efficiency, and bilingual language use

Abstract

This thesis investigates how bilingual experience may reshape referential choices in native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, a language that permits both null and overt pronouns. While L1 attrition at the Syntax-Pragmatics Interface with pronominals is extensively studied in Indo-European languages, little is known about whether similar patterns emerge in Mandarin, a typologically distinct language. Additionally, the underlying mechanisms that drive attrition remain a matter of ongoing debate.

Through a series of experimental studies, this thesis examines whether native Chinese speakers immersed in English, Italian, or Spanish environments show attrition-related changes in reference (i.e. a tendency towards overexplicitness: an increased use of overt pronouns and NPs over null pronouns).

Three mechanisms are tested: crosslinguistic influence (i.e. the influence of a non-null-subject L2 on a pro-drop L1), ambiguity avoidance (i.e. rather be redundant than ambiguous), and processing efficiency (i.e. a strategy of choosing cognitively less demanding options). The findings suggest a consistent trend toward referential overexplicitness: both L1 Mandarin L2 English speakers in the UK and L1 Mandarin L3 Italian/Spanish speakers with limited English (L2) exposure in Italy or Spain used more overt pronouns than null pronouns, compared to more-monolingual speakers in China. This preference for more explicit forms, therefore, cannot be primarily driven by crosslinguistic influence. Further investigation of the other two hypotheses reveals that this tendency cannot be fully explained by a general strategy of ambiguity avoidance, since L1 Mandarin and L2 English speakers did not consistently avoid ambiguity in lexical ambiguity contexts, another type of referential domain. On the contrary, they used more ambiguous labels for ambiguous trials, compared to more-monolinguals. In this connection, their preference for being more explicit in pronoun contexts appears to be conditional: they may tend to avoid ambiguity when doing so helps reduce cognitive load. Eye-tracking data on lexical ambiguity further supports this interpretation: bilingual speakers tended to direct early attention to image pairs with more accessible labels, indicating a preference for linguistic choices that are cognitively easier and less demanding. Taken together, this thesis contributes to a growing body of research on L1 attrition, offering new insights into how bilingual experience can subtly but systematically reshape the use of a fully acquired native language.