The hidden dimensions of language contact: The case of Hungarian-English bilingual children

This dissertation examines the effects of language contact and first language (L1) attrition in Hungarian as spoken by Hungarian-English immigrant children. It explores how and what organizational principles of the mental lexicon play a role in determining what types of surface structures occur in other language contact phenomena, such as convergence and L1 attrition in bilingual language production.;Naturally-occurring bilingual speech produced by six Hungarian-English bilingual children who are growing up in the United States form the data base. The seven to nine years old children were English dominant at the time of the data collection. The data analysis examines morpheme distribution and changes in morphemic structures in terms of three levels of abstract lexical structure and how morphemes are elected in production. It is demonstrated that the children produce some Hungarian morphemes less accurately than other morphemes when speaking Hungarian. The asymmetrical distributions of preverbs and case endings are of specific interest in this study.;The main claim of the study is that what occurs in L1 attrition and convergence largely depends on how the level at which an L1 morpheme is accessed interacts with level(s) at which the competing L2 morpheme is accessed. The results show that system morphemes that are accessed late in the production are more likely to be affected by attrition first than system morphemes that are elected early. A major result of this study is that insights into the nature of preverbs in Hungarian are captured in two new principles, which explain their distribution in L1 attrition. Further, the study demonstrates that much of what appears to be 'loss' of surface morphemes in L1 attrition is, indeed, replacement of abstract features in the L1 by corresponding features in the L2 at different levels of production. The result is the emergence of a composite Matrix Language (ML), in which levels of abstract lexical structure are 'split' and 'recombined' from two linguistic systems. The study concludes that the restructuring mechanisms in L1 attrition and convergence are systematic and reflect how children attempt to keep their linguistic systems internally consistent.