Comprehension of Inuttitut functional morphology by receptive bilinguals

by

Marina Sherkina-Lieber

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Linguistics University of Toronto

Copyright c 2011 by Marina Sherkina-Lieber Abstract

Comprehension of Labrador Inuttitut functional morphology by receptive bilinguals

Marina Sherkina-Lieber

Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of Linguistics

University of Toronto

2011

This study examines knowledge of grammar by receptive bilinguals (RBs) - heritage speakers who describe themselves as capable of fluent comprehension in Labrador Inut- titut (an endangered dialect of ), but of little or no speech production in it. Despite the growing research on incomplete acquisition, RBs have yet to be studied as a specific population.

Participants (8 fluent bilinguals, 17 RBs, 3 low-proficiency RBs) performed a mor- pheme comprehension task and a grammaticality judgment task. General measures of their comprehension and production abilities included a story retelling task as an over- all assessment of comprehension, a vocabulary test, an elicited imitation task, and a production task. This data was complemented by language behaviour interviews.

The results showed that RBs have good, though not perfect, comprehension and ba- sic vocabulary, but speech production is very difficult for them. They have grammatical knowledge, but it is incomplete: Knowledge of some structures is robust, and their com- prehension is fluent (past vs. future contrast, aspectual morphemes); others are missing

(temporal remoteness degrees); and yet for others (case and agreement), RBs have the category and know its position in the word structure, but have difficulty connecting the features with the morphemes expressing them. These findings explain the significant asymmetry between comprehension and production in RBs: In comprehension, incom- plete knowledge may result in loss of some aspects of meaning, but in many cases it

ii can be compensated for by pragmatic knowledge and extralinguistic context, while in production, it can result in the selection of an incorrect morpheme or inability to select

a morpheme.

Low-proficiency RBs have partial comprehension, small vocabulary, and almost no production. They do not understand most functional morphemes; however, they show knowledge of the basic properties such as the position of the obligatory agreement marker on the verb. This study provides data on an understudied language and an understudied popula- tion at the extreme end of unbalanced bilingualism. The findings have implications both for the psycholinguistics of bilingualism and for language revitalization, especially in the context of a language shift in indigenous language communities, where RBs are often the last generation to have competence in the indigenous language.

iii Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to thank my co-advisors, Professor Alana Johns and Professor

Ana-Teresa Perez-Leroux. It was a great pleasure to work with both of them, from the

early discussions on how to start to co-authoring an article to the final stages of thesis

writing. Alana told me about receptive bilinguals in Labrador at the time when I was choosing my thesis topic, and Ana supported my choice. Alana also collected, parsed

and glossed Inuttitut stories that I used for the story retelling task, suggested an elicited

imitation task as screening for receptive bilingualism, and acted as the third (expert)

rater for the non-target answers in the word translation task. Ana, among other great

ideas, suggested a story retelling task as a test of comprehension. I also would like

to thank my third committee member, Professor Rena Helms-Park, for providing yet another perspective on