Event Details

This event is co-organised by the Multilingualism and Cognition Research Group, the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C), and UiT’s Center for Language, Brain and Learning (C/LaBL) Brain Domain.

We are delighted to welcome Assist. Prof. Tania L. Leal as our invites speaker in our joint seminar series.

Talk title: Where Topic Meets Focus: Examining Information Structure Across Methods. I will send an abstract within a couple of days.

Abstract

Research on information structure—the ways in which languages encode the distinction between, broadly, “given” and “new” information—offers a privileged window into the mental architecture of bilinguals. Constructions marking topic and focus are particularly revealing, since they require the coordination of syntax, semantics, and prosody across languages.

This talk brings together several strands of research on the acquisition and processing of information structure, focusing on how bilingual speakers deploy morphosyntactic and discourse cues to interpret and produce and comprehend topic and focus. I begin with studies on thematic topic in Spanish, instantiated through Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD). These studies show that advanced L2 learners and heritage speakers can interpret and process discourse-linked topics in a target-like way, even with limited input. The findings suggest that integration at the syntax–discourse interface—often described as “vulnerable” in bilingual grammars—can be achieved when exposure and proficiency reach sufficient thresholds.

Subsequent work turns to information focus and the realization of prominence in Spanish word order. Spanish and English differ markedly in how they encode focus—syntactically in Spanish, prosodically in English—and bilingual speakers must reconcile these systems in production and comprehension. Results show that proficient bilinguals are sensitive to contextual felicity, distinguishing felicitous (focus-final) from infelicitous (non-final) orders, whereas lower-proficiency learners can display greater difficulty, indicating that discourse integration develops gradually rather than categorically.

Taken together, these studies suggest that bilinguals’ use of information structure reflects a process of continual fine-tuning—where sensitivity to contextual cues becomes increasingly calibrated through experience. Rather than signaling a deficit at external interfaces, we see evidence of a dynamic system in which cue weighting and predictive expectations are gradually reshaped by linguistic experience.

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