http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 08 Mar 2012 IP address: 130.102.158.19 Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15 (2), 2012, 378–396 C  Cambridge University Press 2011 doi:10.1017/S1366728911000307 Comprehension of competing argument marking systems in two Australian mixed languages * CARMEL O’SHANNESSY University of Michigan FELICITY MEAKINS University of Queensland & University of Manchester (Received: April 13, 2010; final revision received: April 26, 2011; accepted: May 7, 2011; first published online November 3, 2011) Crosslinguistic influence has been seen in bilingual adult and child learners when compared to monolingual learners. For speakers of Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol there is no monolingual group for comparison, yet crosslinguistic influence can be seen in how the speakers resolve competition between case-marking and word order systems in each language. Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol are two new Australian mixed languages, spoken in similar, yet slightly different, sociolinguistic contexts, and with similar, yet slightly different, argument marking systems. The different sociolinguistic situations and systems of argument marking lead to a difference in how speakers of each language interpret simple transitive sentences in a comprehension task. Light Warlpiri speakers rely on ergative case-marking as an indicator of agents more often than Gurindji Kriol speakers do. Conversely, Gurindji Kriol speakers rely on word order more often than Light Warlpiri speakers do. Keywords: sentence processing, mixed languages, Warlpiri, Gurindji, case-marking 1. Introduction Studies of sentence interpretation by adult and child monolinguals have shown that in online processing language internal elements may compete to perform particular grammatical roles (e.g. Bates & MacWhinney, 1987; Bates, MacWhinney, Caselli, Devescovi, Natale & Venza, 1984; Kail, 1989; MacWhinney & Bates, 1989). To use an example from Gass (1987), in the English sentence The pencil sees the boys the syntactic and semantic cues give conflicting information about which participant is the agent. According to word order information, the pencil is the agent, but according to semantic and pragmatic information, the boys should be the agent, as boys typically perform the action of “seeing”, and pencils do not. In other words the two types of cues are in competition to provide information about the functional role of agent. * We wish to thank several people for their input on this paper. Our research assistants in Lajamanu: Tanya Hargraves Napanangka, Leah Johnson Napaljarri, and Elaine Johnson Nangala; and in Kalkaringi: Samantha Smiler Nangala-Nanaku, who was instrumental in organising the children and adults for this study and in helping conduct the study. The Principal of Lajamanu Community Education Centre, Frank Atkinson, and staff, especially Gina Atkinson, for ease with data collection. Melissa Bowerman, Penelope Brown and Jane Simpson for experiment design, and Jidong Cheng for liaison with animation creators. Anonymous reviewers of this Journal. This work was funded by the Australian Research Council (Aboriginal Child Language Project), the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, The Netherlands), the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney. Address for correspondence: Carmel O’Shannessy, Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan, 440 Lorch Hall, 611 Tappan Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220, USA carmelos@umich.edu Typologically similar languages make use of cues such as word order, case-marking, noun animacy or intonation to different extents, and can resolve the competition in different ways. For instance, although both English and Italian primarily use SVO word order to indicate grammatical relations, speakers of English give more weight to word order than speakers of Italian do (Bates, 1982). The competition is viewed as a language internal phenomenon, with no reference to the sociolinguistic context in which each language is spoken. But in some cases of bilingualism or multilingualism the resolution of internal competition between elements can be attributed to crosslinguistic influence from other languages spoken. Crosslinguistic influence has been seen in bilingual adult and child learners, whether learning their languages simultaneously or consecutively. The simultaneous bilingual child learners later converge on monolingual-like targets (Döpke, 2000a; Müller & Hulk, 2001), but later second language learners often do not (Cook, Iarossi, Stellakis & Tokumaru, 2003; MacWhinney, 1987a). They may show influence from one language on the other, or a combination of strategies in both (Wulfeck, Juarez, Bates & Kilborn, 1986). In some child learning contexts, children’s production which shows an influence of one language on the other may reflect non-native input the children receive, or native input which contains transfer features, rather than a child’s independent processing of two discrete systems (Paradis & Navarro, 2003). In all of the studies reported on to date a bilingual group is compared to a monolingual