Dislocations in French–English bilingual children: An elicitation study

Coralie Herve, Ludovica Serratrice, Martin Corley

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    This paper presents the results of two sentence production studies addressing the role of language exposure, prior linguistic modelling and discourse-pragmatic appropriateness on the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilingual 5-year-olds. We investigated whether French–English bilingual children would be as likely as monolingual children to use a left-dislocation structure in the description of a target scene. We also examined whether input quantity played a role in the degree of accessibility of these syntactic constructions across languages. While the results indicate a significant effect of elicitation condition only in French, the relative amount of language exposure in each language predicted the likelihood of producing a left-dislocation in both French and English. These findings make a new contribution to the role of language exposure as a predictor of CLI. The data also support the recent proposal that CLI arises out of processing mechanisms.
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalBilingualism
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2015

    Keywords

    • bilingual first language acquisition, cross-linguistic influence, language processing, discourse-pragmatics

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Dislocations in French–English bilingual children: An elicitation study'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this