Resumen de The production of subject anaphoric devices: a comparative study of Italian L2 and heritage speakers

Elisa De Cristofaro, Koen Plevoets

• This study investigates the production of Italian subject anaphoricdevices by monolinguals (L1s), second language speakers (L2s),and heritage language speakers (HLs) with Belgian Dutch as theirfirst or dominant language. Extensive research has shown thatbilinguals tend to overuse explicit anaphoric devices compared tomonolinguals. While this pattern has been documented acrossvarious bilingual profiles, studies directly comparing L2s and HLsremain limited. Such a comparison is particularly relevant forphenomena at the syntax-discourse interface, like anaphoricsubject production, where the effects of age of onset ofacquisition remain unclear. In this study, we investigate whetherHLs align more closely with L1s in their production of subjectanaphoric devices or whether both HLs and L2s use more explicitdevices than monolinguals. Participants realized a storytelling taskand the data was analyzed with a novel approach that combinesCorrespondence Analysis with Multinomial Mixed-effectsmodeling. The results show that HLs generally align with L1s butexhibit more variation in their use of anaphoric subjects. Incontrast, L2s tend to be more explicit, particularly using morelexical phrases in topic continuity contexts. These results highlightthe effect of age of onset of acquisition in shaping bilinguals’referential strategies, suggesting future research directions.