Early bimodal bilingual development of ASL narrative referent cohesion: Using a heritage language framework Wanette Reynolds A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and the Graduate School of Gallaudet University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July, 2016 Acknowledgements First, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Deborah Chen Pichler for your on-going support, advising, teaching, mentorship, astute observations, guidance, patience, cheerleading, and friendship. This dissertation would have not been possible without you, Deb! Second, I sincerely thank my dissertation committee Dr. Gaurav Mathur, Dr. Lourdes Ortega, and Dr. Mary Thumann for all your time, and guidance. Also, thank you to my doctoral program cohort for being a part of this journey, Viola Kozak, Carla Morris, and Jeffrey Palmer. I also send my deepest gratitude to Dr. Diane Lillo-Martin, Dr. Deborah Chen Pichler, and Dr. Ronice Quadros for establishing the Development of Bimodal Bilingualism project and lab and your guidance, and to all the research assistants for making this much needed research happen. A big two-handed THANK- YOU to the bimodal bilingual and Deaf children and their families who participated in the Development of Bimodal Bilingualism project in their longitudinal and experimental studies. I am also grateful for financial support from the Gallaudet Research Institute; CNPQ (Brazilian National Council of Technological and Scientific Development) Grant #200031/2009-0 and #470111/2007-0; and award number R01DC009263 from the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders). The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIDCD or the NIH. Third thank you to Nick Russo, you have been my rock in providing me unrelenting support and patience through all my ups and downs. Much love to you my LP! Thank you to my Deaf parents, Bill and Lois Reynolds, who I hold dearest to my heart for giving me life and ASL/Deaf culture, the biggest gift of all. And of course thank you to my Coda siblings: Lina Hedrick, Brett Reynolds, Amanda McClure, Dustin Reynolds, and Catherine Reynolds for your on-going support and belief in me. Thank you to my fellow Coda researchers Paola Morales, Jenny Singleton, Bob Hoffmeister, Marie Coppola, Betsy McDonald, and Patty Clark. Lastly thank you to all the Codas (blood and non-blood sibs) I have met in and out of CODA International conferences for helping me understand of what it means to be Coda and how much of a treasure it is. ii Abstract This study examines the development of referent tracking in the signed narratives of six bimodal bilingual (Bibi) children who and are first language acquirers of American Sign Language (ASL) and English. This study investigates developmental patterns of referent tracking for these young Bibi children and compares them to those observed for Deaf age-matched peers, as well as for hearing heritage speakers from the spoken language bilingual literature. The Bibi child group (5;02-8;02) was comprised of three children who were born hearing, referred to as children of Deaf adults (Codas), and three children who were early cochlear implanted (DDCI). Six non-cochlear implanted Deaf children served as the control group (5;05-7;10). All twelve children were raised in families with Deaf, signing parents. The study analyzed a total of 36 ASL narratives from a video-retelling task collected at two points in time from the Bibi children, and once from the Deaf controls. Videos were coded for referential function of all subjects, both overt and null. Developmentally, the Bibi children produced more overt forms at Time 1 than at Time 2, especially pronominals for functions where null forms are expected, i.e. maintenance and reintroduction. However, the Bibi children also produced null subject forms at both Time 1 and Time 2 for maintenance and reintroduction, but to a lesser degree than the Deaf comparison group. Furthermore, the Bibi children preferred null subjects occurring with plain verbs for maintenance and reintroduction, whereas the Deaf children preferred null subjects with depiction verbs. Another noteworthy difference between Bibi and Deaf iii children was an increasing preference for fingerspelled nominals by the Bibi children, in contrast to a preference for lexical nominals by the Deaf control group. The Bibi results are reminiscent of referent tracking patterns of unimodal bilingual children acquiring two spoken languages (Serratrice, 2007; Sorace et al., 2009), late bilingual adults acquiring their first signed language as a second language (Bel et al., 2014; Frederiksen & Mayberry, 2015), and adult heritage speakers of spoken languages (Lee et al., 2016; Montrul, 2004; Polinsky 1997). Notable similarities include a higher frequency of overt forms compared to monolinguals and the use of language-specific yet non-target (innovative) structures. The results of this study contribute to the growing literature on bimodal bilingual children (Lillo-Martin, et al., 2012; Palmer, 2015; Quadros et al., 2013) suggesting divergent development from their Deaf counterparts, and proposing that bimodal bilinguals may be best described as heritage signers. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................. ii! Abstract .................................................................................................................. iii! Table of Contents .....................................................................................................v! List of Tables ....................................................................................................... viii! List of Figures ..........................................................................................................x! Chapter I: Introduction .............................................................................................1! Chapter II: Literature Review ................................................................................15! 2.1 Narrative referent cohesion .....................................................................15! 2.1 Crosslinguistic adult patterns of referent cohesion .................................16! 2.2 Monolingual development of referent cohesion .....................................24! 2.3 Bilingual development of narrative referent cohesion ............................31! 2.3.1 Development of referent cohesion by unimodal bilinguals ........31! 2.3.2 Adult L2 bimodal bilingual development of referent cohesion ..36! 2.3.3 Early bimodal bilingual development of referent cohesion ........38! 2.4 Heritage speakers and signers .................................................................43! 2.4.1 Acquisition context of heritage language users ..........................43! 2.4.2 Heritage grammar characteristics ...............................................46! 2.6 Predictions ...............................................................................................55! Chapter III: Methods ..............................................................................................59! 3.1 Participant data ........................................................................................59! 3.2 Stimuli & Data collection procedure ......................................................63! 3.3 Transcription of ASL and English ..........................................................70! v 3.4 Coding methods ......................................................................................74! 3.4.1 Entity ...........................................................................................76! 3.4.2 Topic Shift ..................................................................................77! 3.4.3 Referent function ........................................................................78! 3.4.4 Referent form ..............................................................................79! 3.4.5 Form subtype ..............................................................................81! 3.4.6 Modified NP ...............................................................................83! 3.4.7 Typicality ....................................................................................84! 3.4.8 Reliability .............................................................................................85! Chapter IV: Results ................................................................................................86! 4.1 Parallel patterns of referent tracking .......................................................86! 4.2 Developmentally convergent patterns of referent tracking .....................89! 4.3 Continued divergent patterns of referent tracking ..................................90! Chapter V: Discussion ...........................................................................................94! 5.1 Parallel patterns with heritage speakers ..................................................94! 5.2 Language and modality-specific effects in a heritage signed language 105! 5.2.1 Fingerspelled vs. lexical nominals ............................................105! 5.2.2 Indexical vs. lexical pronominal forms .....................................109! 5.2.3 Null subject forms with plain, agreement, and depictive verbs 111! 5.2.4 Summary of modality-specific forms .......................................116!