Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children: a meta-analysis

Abstract

Although cross-linguistic influence at the level of morphosyntax is one of the most intensively studied topics in child bilingualism, the circumstances under which it occurs remain unclear. In this meta-analysis, we measured the effect size of cross-linguistic influence and systematically assessed its predictors in 750 simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children in 17 unique language combinations across 26 experimental studies. We found a significant small to moderate average effect size of cross-linguistic influence, indicating that cross-linguistic influence is part and parcel of bilingual development. Language dominance, operationalized as societal language, was a significant predictor of cross-linguistic influence, whereas surface overlap, language domain and age were not. Perhaps an even more important finding was that definitions and operationalisations of cross-linguistic influence and its predictors varied considerably between studies. This could explain the absence of a comprehensive theory in the field. To solve this issue, we argue for a more uniform method of studying cross-linguistic influence.

The Bilingual Native Speaker Competence: Evidence From Explicit and Implicit Language Knowledge Using Elicited Production, Sentence-Picture Matching, and Pupillometry

“…It is for instance obvious that a “bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person” (Grosjean, 1989 ). There is cross-linguistic influence at play in bilingual development (Müller and Hulk, 2001 ) that is attested in many morphosyntactic domains in 2L1 and eL2 (e.g., Schmitz et al, 2012 ; Scherger, 2016 ; for a meta-analysis see van Dijk et al, 2021 ). This interaction of languages within a bilingual individual is “part and parcel of bilingual development” (van Dijk et al, 2021 , p. 1).…”

“…There is cross-linguistic influence at play in bilingual development (Müller and Hulk, 2001 ) that is attested in many morphosyntactic domains in 2L1 and eL2 (e.g., Schmitz et al, 2012 ; Scherger, 2016 ; for a meta-analysis see van Dijk et al, 2021 ). This interaction of languages within a bilingual individual is “part and parcel of bilingual development” (van Dijk et al, 2021 , p. 1). However, it is unclear whether early bi- or multilingual speakers are native speakers of two or more languages (Wilkinson, 2020 , p. 285).…”

Child Heritage Language Development: An Interplay Between Cross-Linguistic Influence and Language-External Factors

“…A negative cross-linguistic influence (also called cross-linguistic transfer/interference), defined as "deviation from the norms of either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a result of their familiarity with more than one language" (Weinreich, 1968), has been robustly demonstrated in the acquisition of L2/SL in simultaneous and sequential bilingual children (e.g., Zdorenko and Paradis, 2008;Blom et al, 2012). A recent meta-analysis which evaluated cross-linguistic influence and its predictors in 750 simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children (aged 4;0-10;0) in 17 unique language combinations across 26 experimental studies confirmed the presence of crosslinguistic influences in bilingual morphosyntactic acquisition (see Van Dijk et al, 2021).…”

“…Alternatively, studies showed that child HL speakers diverge from their monolingual peers in this domain. Some researchers attribute these divergences to cross-linguistic influences (for a detailed overview on cross-linguistic influence in child bilingualism see Serratrice, 2013;Van Dijk et al, 2021), while some studies found that cross-linguistic influences did not affect the HL acquisition of morphosyntax, suggesting that language-external factors shape child HL development (e.g., Daskalaki et al, 2019Daskalaki et al, , 2020Rodina et al, 2020). Cross-linguistic influences and languageexternal factors might not be mutually exclusive and shape HL development together (Daskalaki et al, 2019(Daskalaki et al, , 2020Van Dijk et al, 2021).…”

“…But on the production tasks, the same children correctly produced the ACC marking. A meta-analysis by Van Dijk et al ( 2021 ) compared the magnitude of cross-linguistic influence in 26 studies between bilinguals and their monolingual peers on a wide range of morphosyntactic structures and concluded that “cross-linguistic influence is part and parcel of being bilingual and can manifest itself in various linguistic contexts.” The authors furthermore concluded that the magnitude of cross-linguistic influence is stronger from the SL to the HL, which is crucial for the predictions of the current study, as our study focuses on the influence of two typologically different SLs on HL-Russian.…”