The development of determiners in the context of French-English bilingualism: a study of cross-linguistic influence

Herve, C. and Serratrice, L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5141-6186 (2018) The development of determiners in the context of French-English bilingualism: a study of cross-linguistic influence. Journal of Child Language, 45 (3). pp. 767-787. ISSN 0305-0009 doi: 10.1017/S0305000917000459

Abstract/Summary

This paper reports the preliminary results of a study examining the role of structural overlap, language exposure and language use on cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilingual first language acquisition. We focus on the longitudinal development of determiners in a corpus of two French-English children between the ages of 2;4 and 3;7. The results display bi-directional CLI in the rate of development, i.e. accelerated development in English and a minor delay in French. Unidirectional CLI from English to French was instead observed in the significantly higher rate of ungrammatical determiner omissions in plural and generic contexts than in singular specific contexts in French. These findings suggest that other language-internal mechanisms may be at play. They also lend support to the role of expressive abilities on the magnitude of this phenomenon.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/73177
Identification Number/DOI	10.1017/S0305000917000459
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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