Moving in L2 Chinese from childhood to adulthood: Developmental and crosslinguistic factors in bilingual event construal

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: The paper examined whether Uyghur-Chinese early successive bilinguals fully acquire motion event construal characteristic of their L2 Chinese, and how factors such as structural overlap between their two languages (i.e., verb-framing) and path type (i.e., presence or absence of boundary crossing) shape the acquisition process. Design/Methodology/Approach: Adopting a developmental approach, we included both child and adult bilinguals within a single design. Participants narrated video clips depicting both boundary-crossing and non-boundary-crossing events (i.e., across vs. up/down). Data and Analysis: The database comprised motion event descriptions of bilinguals representing three age groups (4–6 -year-olds [AG1, no. 48], 8–10 -year-olds [AG2, no. 48], and adult bilinguals [AG3, no. 30]), and Chinese monolinguals (no. 12). Data were analysed in terms of both ‘structural’ (linguistic devices used, and how they were arranged syntactically) and ‘pragmatic’ dimensions of motion expression (how frequently speakers profiled different event components). Findings/Conclusions: Analyses revealed that bilinguals fully established the ‘structural’ aspects of target system at AG2, but the ‘pragmatic’ aspect became target-like at AG3. Structural overlap led to crosslinguistic influence for non-boundary-crossing events while more general effects of path type manifested only at AG1. Originality: The paper enriches current research by featuring a non-Western bilingual community. By focusing on a language pair that is distant genealogically (Turkic vs. Sino-Tibetan) and typologically (agglutinative vs. analytic) but shares key structures in expressing motion, it contributes to a better understanding of the role of structural factors in bilingual event construal. Its developmental approach sheds light on both the process and the product of bilingual language acquisition. Significance/Implications: Our findings confirm that early successive bilinguals can eventually acquire L2-specific patterns of motion construal, but the developmental asymmetry observed between the ‘structural’ and ‘pragmatic’ aspects of motion expression underlines the importance of examining both these aspects for an accurate understanding of bilingual construal of motion events.