Chapter 12. Cross-linguistic influences in bilingual morphosyntactic acquisition

Abstract

The interaction between the bilingual child’s two languages, coined as Cross-linguistic influence (CLI), is a well-reported phenomenon in bilingual language development. Although CLI has long dominated bilingualism research, issues about its nature (a representational change or by-product of language co-activation), timing and duration remain less well understood. Is CLI only observed during early bilingual development, and does it fade away as children grow older? Does it lead to qualitative and quantitative differences in language development between bilinguals and monolinguals? The present chapter addresses these questions by reviewing state-of-the-art studies reporting CLI in simultaneous and sequential bilingual children’s acquisition of morphology and syntax. We also discuss how extra-linguistic factors such as age of acquisition, dominance, input quality and quantity modulate CLI.

Uyghur–Chinese early successive bilingual children's acquisition of voluntary motion expressions

“…This brings us to the issue of longevity of CLI. Recent reviews of CLI in early successive bilingualism concluded that CLI is a bilingual phenomenon rather than a developmental one (Chondrogianni, 2023;van Dijk et al, 2022). However, that bilingual children's use of the verb-framed pattern dropped to the adult level at 10, alongside Tusun's (2022b) finding that adult bilinguals showed no CLI, suggest that it can indeed be a developmental phenomenon (Hulk, 2017).…”

“…But as discussed in Section 5, this distinction is blurred in Xinjiang because, among other things, Uyghurs represent nearly half of the population; and by virtue of its unique sociolinguistic dynamics (Elterish, 2016) and its educational system, children's exposure to and use of their L1 tend to be in comparable proportions to their L2 from kindergarten onwards. It is possible that these factors conspire to engender more balanced bilingualism (Chondrogianni, 2023;Unsworth et al, 2018) where CLI could become less detectable or less of a bilingual trait.…”

“…Additionally, most of the studies involved adult bilinguals while those on children tended not to include many age groups. We know little about how language-universal factors found to operate in monolingual child language acquisition (Hendriks et al, 2022) inform bilingual language acquisition, how the aspect of 'semantic density', known to develop later than the acquisition of lexicalisation patterns per se in monolinguals, develops in bilingual children, how this is affected by CLI, and indeed, how CLI plays out developmentally, an issue much debated in the context of the acquisition of morphosyntax (Chondrogianni, 2023;van Dijk et al, 2022) but relatively unexplored in the motion domain. We therefore need a developmental perspective.…”

“…As per the claim that CLI is part and parcel of the bilingual experience (cf. Chondrogianni, 2023;van Dijk et al, 2022), CLI would persist throughout childhood such that Uyghur-Chinese bilingual children across age groups would consistently use verb-framed constructions more than Chinese adults. Alternatively, in light of L2 studies showing a decrease of CLI as a function of increased proficiency (Montero-Melis & Jaeger, 2020;Park, 2020), bilingual children could use verb-framed constructions more frequently than adults at the early stages, but this would decrease over time while their use of equipollently-framed constructions would increase, eventually converging on the target equipollent system.…”

Heritage language development and processing: Non-canonical word orders in Mandarin–English child heritage speakers

“…As we have discussed in the previous section, we found that heritage children's production and comprehension were affected by linguistic factors also applicable to monolingual children, i.e., the presence or absence of morphosyntactic cues, as well as factors unique to themselves, i.e., CLI from the societal dominant language to the HL, which also interacted with another linguistic factor, i.e., word order. It is worth noting here that although we term CLI as a linguistic factor, it is less so as a pure linguistic factor compared to the presence or absence of morphosyntactic cue in the sense that it also varies across individual as a function of language dominance for example (see Chondrogianni, 2023;Van Dijk et al, 2021).…”