Hind Alsaleh
Doctoral Student in Linguistics - Hind’s thesis is entitled 'First Language Attrition and Syntactic Subjects: A Study of Saudi-English Bilinguals'.
A brief outline of the research project
The current study examines the usage and acceptability of overt subjects as well as their word order distributions in the context of First Language (L1) attrition. Previous studies reported that bilinguals accept and overextend their use of overt pronouns in contexts where they are unacceptable (Chamorro et al. 2016; Gurel, 2011; Tsimpli et al. 2004). This research will investigate whether overt pronouns are accepted in more contexts by Saudi-English bilinguals than by monolinguals. It will also explore how bilinguals interpret and use overt pronouns. To investigate the research questions, this study will implement three methods. The first is an offline acceptability task. The second is a picture verification task. The third is a naturalistic L1 corpus. These three methods will provide offline and online data. It is predicted that bilinguals will accept overt pronouns more frequently than monolinguals. Furthermore, it is expected that external variables, like the length of stay and social network will affect Saudi-English bilinguals. Additionally, based on the literature, it is predicted that the results of the offline acceptability task would be less significant than those of the online task and corpus (Chamorro et al. 2016).