Although cross-linguistic influence at the level of morphosyntax is one of the most intensively studied topics in child bilingualism, the circumstances under which it occurs remain unclear. In this meta-analysis, we measured the effect size of cross-linguistic influence and systematically assessed its predictors in 750 simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children in 17 unique language combinations across 26 experimental studies. We found a significant small to moderate average effect size of cross-linguistic influence, indicating that cross-linguistic influence is part and parcel of bilingual development. Language dominance, operationalized as societal language, was a significant predictor of cross-linguistic influence, whereas surface overlap, language domain and age were not. Perhaps an even more important finding was that definitions and operationalisations of cross-linguistic influence and its predictors varied considerably between studies. This could explain the absence of a comprehensive theory in the field. To solve this issue, we argue for a more uniform method of studying cross-linguistic influence.
The Cross-linguistic Lexical Task (CLT; Haman, Łuniewska & Pomiechowska, 2015) is a vocabulary task designed to enable cross-linguistic comparisons both across and within (bilingual) children. In this paper we assessed the validity of the CLT as a measure of language proficiency in bilingual children, by determining the extent to which (i) age-matched, monolingual Spanish-speaking and Dutch-speaking children obtained similar scores, (ii) the CLT correlated with other measures of language proficiency in monolingual and bilingual children, and (iii) whether the factors underlying the CLT's construction, i.e., target words’ estimated Age of Acquisition and Complexity Index, were predictive of children's scores. Our results showed that, while the CLT correlated with other measures and is therefore a valid means of tapping into language proficiency, caution is required when using it to compare children's language proficiency cross-linguistically, as scores for Dutch-speaking and Spanish-speaking monolinguals sometimes differed.
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