Tracking Reference in Space: How L2 Learners Use ASL Referring Expressions

Producing narrative is a skill that must be acquired in order to become a competent language user in a first as well as in a second language. In children, narrative competence is often acquired late (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979), in part because children only start stringing sentences together regularly, once they have acquired the linguistic skills necessary to form sentences. Cohesive discourse, however, depends on more than the ability to employ resources from phonology, morphology and syntax. An important additional skill is the pragmatics of taking into account what the addressee knows. One place where this necessity is obvious is in the domain of reference to persons and objects. When children first begin narrating, they often produce referring expressions that are uninformative from the addressee’s point of view. This is because they do not adhere to adult norms of varying referring expressions as a function of accessibility in the discourse. In adult second language learners, however, such pragmatic competences are in place from the beginning. Such learners have often had years of experience creating cohesive narratives in their first language. Consequently, we might expect narrative competence in second language acquisition to depend only on the ability to produce the appropriate linguistic means. Studies of this topic, however, have shown that this expectation is not born out. Beginning and intermediate second language learners produce narratives that are referentially unlike the native norm. This pattern has been attested in a variety of sourcetarget language pairs, leading scholars to assume the existence of some universal interlanguage stage for reference. However, past studies in the field have focused on language pairs in the spoken modality. In order to claim universality, we need to see the interlanguage pattern attested in the visual modality as well. To date, only one study has investigated patterns of reference tracking in a signed second language. Bel, Ortells, and Morgan (2014) tested proficient second language learners of Catalan Sign Language, and found some evidence of the pattern described for spoken L2 learners. However, because Bel et al.’s