How (not) to cross a boundary: Crosslinguistic influence in simultaneous bilingual children's event construal

Abstract

Simultaneous bilingual children sometimes display crosslinguistic influence (CLI), widely attested in the domain of morphosyntax. It remains less clear whether CLI affects bilinguals’ event construal, what motivates its occurrence and directionality, and how developmentally persistent it is. The present study tested predictions generated by the structural overlap hypothesis and the co-activation account in the motion event domain. 96 English–French bilingual children of two age groups and 96 age-matched monolingual English and French controls were asked to describe animated videos displaying voluntary motion events. Semantic encoding in main verbs showed bidirectional CLI. Unidirectional CLI affected French path encoding in the verbal periphery and was predicted by the presence of boundary-crossing, despite the absence of structural overlap. Furthermore, CLI increased developmentally in the French data. It is argued that these findings reflect highly dynamic co-activation patterns sensitive to the requirements of the task and to language-specific challenges in the online production process.

Uyghur–Chinese Adult Bilinguals’ Construal of Voluntary Motion Events

“…Motion event typology has served as an extremely useful framework for examining bilingual cognition and language use. Two issues that have been at the heart of much research is whether and to what extent bilinguals develop language-specific patterns of thinking-for-speaking and the role of CLI (e.g., Hohenstein et al, 2006 ; Daller et al, 2011 ; Engemann et al, 2012 ; Aveledo and Athanasopoulos, 2016 ; Engemann, 2016 , 2021 ; Miller et al, 2018 ; Wang and Wei, 2021 ). The studies have mostly focused on typologically contrasting languages (English vs. French/Spanish) and have involved both child and adult bilinguals.…”

“… Serratrice, 2016 ), a couple of extant studies indicate that CLI may increase over time (cf. Aveledo and Athanasopoulos, 2016 ; Engemann, 2021 ).…”

“…This study explored the implication of Talmy’s (2000) motion event typology and its subsequent articulations in relation to Slobin’s (1996 , 2006 ) thinking-for-speaking hypothesis for the context of early successive bilingualism. While there are numerous studies in this regard (e.g., Hohenstein et al, 2006 ; Daller et al, 2011 ; Filipović, 2011 ; Engemann, 2021 ; Wang and Wei, 2021 ), they are mostly concerned with European languages, and as per Talmy’s typological classification, languages that are typological contrasting, i.e., verb-framed vs. satellite-framed (e.g., Spanish/French vs. English/German). We therefore know relatively little about what happens in language combinations beyond the Indo-European and that are typologically overlapping.…”

Språk i skola, på fritid och i arbetsliv: Aktuella arenor för svensk forskning inom tillämpad språkvetenskap

“…Thus, the quadrilingual children in this study differ from monolingual children learning v-languages who tend to focus on path rather than manner (Hickmann, 2006;Hickmann et al, 2018). They do, however, align with successive and simultaneous bilingual children acquiring s-and v-languages who extensively use manner verbs and path satellites in v-languages (Akta-Erciyes, 2020;Engemann, 2016Engemann, , 2021Nicoladis & Brisard, 2002).…”

“…In a recent study, Engemann (2021) found that French-English simultaneous bilingual children-living in France and reportedly exposed to equal input in both languages from birth-maintained the typological patterns of each of their languages, mainly combining manner verbs with path satellites in English but using fewer satellites in French. Engemann (2021) also found examples of crosslinguistic influence, showing that the children used more path verbs in their English compared to English monolinguals, whereas they in French used manner verbs and path satellites more frequently than French monolinguals.…”