Language development in Mandarin-speaking heritage children: comprehension and production of anaphoric subject pronouns

Languages differ in their use of referential devices, e.g., personal pronouns such as he/she, to refer to discourse entities. In some languages, like in English, overt pronouns need to be used when referring to an entity already mentioned (apart from few marked exceptions), whereas in languages such as Italian, pronouns can be dropped. For that reason, English is called a non-null subject language (NNS), because subject pronouns cannot be dropped, whereas Italian is considered a null subject language (NS). How pronouns are interpreted and produced can change as a function of age (e.g., children vs adults) and exposure (monolinguals vs. bilinguals). Research to date has primarily examined NNS-NS language combinations (Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; Sorace et al., 2009). A common finding is that bilinguals are more likely to opt for the overt pronoun. This has been interpreted as influence from the NNS language (e.g., English) on the NS language (e.g., Italian), and has been coined in the literature as Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) (Serratrice, Sorace and Paoli, 2004). Bilingual speakers' preference for overt pronouns has also been attributed to a default bilingual cognitive strategy and not with specific language pairs (Sorace, 2016).
No studies to date have examined how pronouns are interpreted in bilingual contexts in languages like Mandarin Chinese (henceforth Mandarin) (but see own MSc dissertation). Mandarin has traditionally been coined a topic-drop language (Yi, 2019), which means that the conditions under which pronouns can be dropped differ from both NNS and NS languages (see s2).
The present study will investigate how Mandarin pronouns are produced and interpreted in Mandarin-English bilingual children of Chinese heritage (CHSs). To understand whether pronouns in Mandarin are also affected by CLI from English, I will compare Mandarin-speaking heritage children living in the UK with monolingual children residing in China. Similar to monolingual children (MC), the CHSs acquired Mandarin as their first language from birth but also received a significant amount of English input in families and schools (Montrul, 2015). Thus, their acquisition of subject pronouns in Mandarin might be influenced by English. I will investigate comprehension of pronouns using subtle techniques with millisecond precision as the sentence unfolds. To examine developmental effects, I will compare MC to adults.