Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
RLA. REVISTA DE LINGÜÍSTICA TEÓRICA Y APLICADA, cilt.59, sa.2, ss.63-80, 2021 (SSCI)
The present study reports data from a 40-item acceptability judgment task in Italian on
the interpretation of backward anaphora in complex sentences in which three groups
participated. The groups included bilingual Italian native speakers highly proficient in
Turkish as a second language (L2), and Turkish and Italian simultaneous bilingual (2L1)
children and monolingual native Italian speakers as a control group. In the 40-item acceptability
judgment task in Italian, they were asked the degree of acceptability of sentences
introduced by short stories suggesting coreference or disjoint reading of the overt
or null pronoun. It was assumed that Italian and Turkish languages do not differ with
respect to the antecedent biases of null and overt subject pronouns in the contexts under
investigation, except for anaphoric pronoun “kendi” that when it is used as the thirdperson
singular or plural, always expressing anaphoric references with the subject in the
matrix sentence. The findings revealed a significant difference in the monolingual group
regarding the null pronoun when preceded by a quantifier. This is discussed as evidence
for the cross-linguistic influence at the syntax-discourse interface in 2L1 acquisition in
children and in L1 attrition in language with similar parametric settings and for the fact
that quality and quantity of input in the native or minority language can significantly
diminish the effect.