• Effects of markedness in gender processing in Italian as a heritage language: A speed accuracy tradeoff 

      Di Pisa, Grazia; Kubota, Maki; Rothman, Jason; Marinis, Theodoros (Journal article; Tidsskriftartikkel; Peer reviewed, 2022-10-12)
      This study examined potential sources of grammatical gender variability in heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with a focus on morphological markedness. Fifty-four adult Italian HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed an online Self-Paced Reading Task and an offline Grammaticality Judgment Task. Both tasks involved sentences with grammatical and ungrammatical noun-adjective ...
    • Rhetorical question comprehension by Italian–German bilingual children 

      Geiss, Miriam; Ferin, Maria; Marinis, Theodoros; Kupisch, Tanja (Journal article; Tidsskriftartikkel; Peer reviewed, 2023-01-12)
      This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker’s belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and lexical-syntactic cues. Being childhood learners, ...