Cross-linguistic influence during online sentence processing in bilingual children

Dijk, Chantal van; Dijkstra, Ton; Unsworth, Sharon

doi:10.1017/s1366728922000050

Cited by 12 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 73 publications

(140 reference statements)

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“…More studies are however needed to confirm the possible absence of cross-linguistic influence on processing strategies in the HL, as well as to uncover the role that language dominance plays in child HL processing. Our findings seem to be at odds with those of Van Dijk et al (2022) who report effects of cross-linguistic influence on the processing of V2 structures in Dutch by German-Dutch bilingual children. These effects were more pronounced the more dominant the children were in German.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

“…Taken together, the results of the on-line comprehension task corroborate previous findings that looked at real-time sentence processing in L2 children and found qualitatively similar processing patterns in bilinguals and monolinguals ( Chondrogianni and Marinis, 2012 ; Chondrogianni et al, 2015a , b ). Our findings also show that, at the quantitative level, Romanian heritage children process sentences at a faster rate than monolingual children (see van Dijk et al (2022) for similar results with Dutch bilingual and monolingual children). The faster processing behavior observed in the bilingual group in the self-paced listening task could potentially suggest a general effect of bilingualism on sentence processing in children, which could result in more efficient sentence processing.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

“…Previous studies with L2 children looking at real-time sentence processing report qualitatively similar processing patterns in bilinguals and monolinguals for tense ( Chondrogianni and Marinis, 2012 ), articles ( Chondrogianni et al, 2015a ), articles and clitics ( Chondrogianni et al, 2015b ), word order ( van Dijk et al, 2022 ). Therefore, we expected Romanian HL children to show similar processing patterns to Romanian monolingual children.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 71%

“…These have mainly focused on early L2 learners and compared children’s real-time processing of L2 morphosyntactic properties to that of their monolingual peers ( Marinis, 2007 ; Chondrogianni and Marinis, 2012 ; Marinis and Saddy, 2013 ; Chondrogianni et al, 2015a , b ) and generally report qualitatively similar processing patterns in bilinguals and monolinguals. Lemmerth and Hopp (2019) and van Dijk et al (2022) specifically tested the effects of cross-linguistic influence on bilingual children’s on-line sentence processing. van Dijk et al (2022) , for example, tested English-Dutch and German-Dutch bilinguals aged 5 to 9 on a self-paced listening task assessing processing of word order in Dutch sentences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… Lemmerth and Hopp (2019) and van Dijk et al (2022) specifically tested the effects of cross-linguistic influence on bilingual children’s on-line sentence processing. van Dijk et al (2022) , for example, tested English-Dutch and German-Dutch bilinguals aged 5 to 9 on a self-paced listening task assessing processing of word order in Dutch sentences. They found similar listening patterns in the V2 and V3 condition in Dutch in both monolinguals and bilinguals, but also report effects of cross-linguistic influence in the German-Dutch group in the condition instantiating a structural overlap between the two languages.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Multiple wh-interrogatives in child heritage Romanian: On-line comprehension and production

Bentea

Marinis

2022

Front. Psychol.

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This study compared the online comprehension and the production of multiple interrogatives in 18 Romanian-English bilingual children aged 6;0–9;2 (MAGE = 8;0) living in the UK who have Romanian as heritage language (L1) and English as majority language (L2) and 32 Romanian monolingual children aged 6;11 to 9;8 (MAGE = 8;3). We examined whether differences emerge between heritage and monolingual children in the online comprehension and in the production of multiple interrogatives in Romanian, which requires fronting of all wh-phrases, contrary to English. The main aim was to uncover to which extent similarities or differences in morphosyntactic properties between the L1 and the L2 systems affect the acquisition and processing of the heritage language/L1. Online comprehension was assessed in a self-paced listening task, while production was assessed using an elicitation task. The results reveal that Romanian heritage children show similar online comprehension patterns to monolingual children for multiple interrogatives in Romanian. A different pattern emerges for production as heritage children produce less complex multiple questions in Romanian and avoid movement of two wh-phrases in all elicited structures. Given that their predominant responses for multiple interrogatives only make use of the structural option present in English, namely one fronted wh-phrase and one in-situ, we take this to show that there is transfer from the majority language to the heritage language. Thus, language production in the children’s L1 seems to be affected by properties of the dominant L2, under cross-linguistic influence. Taken together, the results for both comprehension and production suggest that heritage children are able to establish the underlying representation of multiple wh-movement structures, similarly to monolinguals, but have difficulties activating the more complex structure in production.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Multiple wh-interrogatives in child heritage Romanian: On-line comprehension and production

Bentea

Marinis

2022

Front. Psychol.

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Sensitivity to syntactic dependency formation in child second language processing: a study of numeral quantifiers in Korean

Kim

et al. 2023

Lang. cogn.

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This study investigates whether child second language (L2) learners can use syntactic information during the processing of sentences involving unbounded dependencies and how their processing patterns compare to those of child monolinguals and adult L2 learners. Through a self-paced reading experiment involving the numeral quantifier (NQ) construction in Korean, we tested participants’ sensitivity to agreement violations between a noun phrase (NP) and an NQ in local and nonlocal conditions. The results showed that a subset of child L2 learners who demonstrated target-like knowledge of NP-NQ agreement in an offline task spent a longer processing time in the NP-NQ mismatch than in the NP-NQ match condition, in both local and nonlocal contexts. These child L2 learners’ processing patterns were comparable to those observed in child monolinguals and adult L2 learners. These findings suggest that child and adult L2 learners rely on the same system of syntactic representations and processing mechanisms that guide first language processing.

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Shared representations in cognate comprehension and production: An online picture naming and lexical decision study with bilingual children

Koutamanis,

Kootstra,

Dijkstra

et al. 2024

Applied Psycholinguistics

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The cognate facilitation effect, a classic example of cross-language interaction in the bilingual lexicon, has mostly been studied in adults. We examined the extent to which such effects occurred in simultaneous bilingual children’s word processing, to what extent these were modulated by language dominance, and to what extent this differed between comprehension and production tasks. Simultaneous bilingual Dutch-Greek children, ranging from Dutch-dominant to Greek-dominant, performed auditory lexical decision and picture-naming tasks in an online experiment. Cognate facilitation effects emerged in both tasks but manifested themselves differently. In lexical decision, there was an interaction effect with language dominance in accuracy, while in picture naming there was a main effect in reaction times. These findings suggest that, similar to what has been found for adults, simultaneous bilingual children have an integrated lexicon, in which both languages are interactively connected. Effects may differ as a combined result of factors such as comprehension versus production and individual differences in language dominance. Importantly, despite such differences, our results show that cognate effects emerge across tasks and across a range of individual children’s language dominance, indicating that shared representations within the bilingual lexicon are accessed during both word comprehension and production.

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Cross-linguistic influence during online sentence processing in bilingual children

Cited by 12 publications

References 73 publications

Multiple wh-interrogatives in child heritage Romanian: On-line comprehension and production

Multiple wh-interrogatives in child heritage Romanian: On-line comprehension and production

Sensitivity to syntactic dependency formation in child second language processing: a study of numeral quantifiers in Korean

Shared representations in cognate comprehension and production: An online picture naming and lexical decision study with bilingual children

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