Projects

External

• SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, CA) Insight Development Grant. The bilingual development of immigrant children in Western Canada: Predictors and outcomes of cross-linguistic influence. Evangelia Daskalaki (Main Applicant), with Johanne Paradis (Co-Applicant) and Adriana Soto-Corominas (collaborator), 7/2020-present.

→ The aim of the proposed research program is to identify the factors (language-level; child-level; environmental) that determine the occurrence, magnitude, and directionality of cross-linguistic influence in heritage contexts. To this end, we will focus on three language groups that are well-represented in Western Canada: (Levantine) Arabic-English bilingual children, (non-Caribbean) Spanish-English, and Mandarin/Cantonese- English bilingual children. Target structures will include subject/object placement and subject/object expression in different discourse contexts. Comparisons with respect to these structures will be based on narrative and oral elicitation tasks.

• CYRRC (Child and Youth Refugee Research Coalition) grant. Exploring the interdependence between morphological and syntactic development in heritage contexts: The case of Syrian refugee children in Canada. Evangelia Daskalaki (Principal Investigator), with Johanne Paradis, Adriana Soto-Corominas, and Aisha Barise (Co-Investigators), 01/2020-present.

→ Languages may use a combination of syntactic (word order) and morphological devices (case and subject-verb agreement) to encode grammatical relations (i.e., who is doing what to whom). It has been hypothesized that, in the case of heritage speakers, difficulties with complex structures, which involve non-canonical/marked word orders, may result from loss of sensitivity to these alternative morphological devices (Polinsky, 2018, among others). Accordingly, the proposed project will explore whether knowledge of agreement morphology (in addition to age related and environmental factors) modulate children’s comprehension of object relative clauses in their HL-Syrian Arabic and L2-English. Results will be based on offline sentence-picture matching tasks.

Internal

• Killam Research Operating Fund (University of Alberta). Heritage Greek: Understanding the role of cross-linguistic transfer. Evangelia Daskalaki (Main Applicant), 6/2018-4/2019 [Collaborative Research Project with Vicky Chondrogianni (University of Edinburgh) and Elma Blom (Utrecht University)].

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• CERF-Special (Capital Equipment Recruitment Fund Special), in support of the Heritage Lab. Evangelia Daskalaki (Main Applicant), Arts-2017/2018 Competition.

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• EFF-SAS Research Fund (Endowment Fund for the Future: Support for the Advancement of Scholarship, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta). Acquiring Greek as a Heritage Language: The role of the parental input. Evangelia Daskalaki (Main Applicant), 6/2017-11/2017 [Collaborative Research Project with Elma Blom (Utrecht University), Vicky Chondrogianni (University of Edinburgh), and Johanne Paradis (University of Alberta)].

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