Dislocations in French–English bilingual children: an elicitation study

Herve, C., Serratrice, L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5141-6186 and Corley, M. (2016) Dislocations in French–English bilingual children: an elicitation study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19 (5). pp. 987-1000. ISSN 1469-1841 doi: 10.1017/S1366728915000401

Abstract/Summary

This paper presents the results of two sentence production studies addressing the role of syntactic priming and of language exposure on the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilingual 5-year-olds. We investigated whether French-English bilingual children could be primed to use a topic (i.e. left-dislocation) and whether their performance differed substantially to that of French and English monolinguals. We also examined whether input quantity plays a role on the degree of accessibility of this syntactic construction in the bilinguals’ mind. While the results indicate a significant effect of elicitation condition only in French, they display a positive correlation between input quantity and the likelihood to produce a left-dislocation in both French and English. These findings make a strong case for the role of language exposure as a predictor of CLI. The data also support the recent proposal that CLI is the result of the daily processing of two languages.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/66494
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Language and Cognition Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Clinical Language Sciences Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM)
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
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