Dislocations in French–English bilingual children: An elicitation study

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.

Exploring the role of cognitive control in syntactic processing

“…Another possibility is that 33 inhibitory mechanisms only prevent access to the shared syntactic representations when the prime and target are not an equally good option in the two languages. Accordingly, Vasilyeva et al (2010) were not able to prime fue-passives from English to Spanish and Hervé et al (2015) report that the effect of priming is significantly weaker when the primed structure is not pragmatically felicitous in the target language. In the latter study, English-French bilinguals produced pragmatically odd left-dislocations in English as a result of priming, but the effect was significantly weaker than in French, where priming did not lead to the production of inappropriate forms.…”

“…Hervé et al (2015) conclude that bilingual children are sensitive to the relative frequency of the structure in their languages; however, crosslinguistic influence takes place and increases as a function of language exposure; in addition, they suggest that priming can override discourse-pragmatic constraints in bilingual children, but not in monolingual children.…”

“…Since then, this very robust phenomenon has been observed in several different experimental settings, from dialogue to sentence completion tasks to comprehension tasks (e.g., Cleland & Pickering, 2003;Pickering & Garrod, 2004;Gries 2005). Also, it has been studied in different languages and populations, including children and bilingual speakers (e.g., Loebell & Bock, 2003;Bencini & Valian, 2008;Hervé, Serratrice & Corley, 2015). According to Branigan (2007), priming takes place because exposure to a stimulus has a facilitative effect on later processing of that same stimulus.…”

“…To our knowledge, these include Vasilyeva, Waterfall, Gámez, Gómez, Bowers and Shimpi (2010), Hsin, Legendre and Omaki (2013) and Hervé, Serratrice and Corley (2015). Vasilyeva et al (2010) tested passive voice in 65 English-Spanish bilingual children aged 5;2 to 6;5 using bidirectional priming (English to Spanish and Spanish to English).…”

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

“…Crucially, Hsin et al (2013) showed that syntactic constructions are shared across languages even in the absence of structural overlap, as Spanish-English children were successfully primed to use the English Adj+N word order in Spanish, a language in which the canonical word order for adjectives is postnominal. Hervé et al (2015) indicated that bilingual children are sensitive to the frequency of syntactic structures in their input as language exposure affected the likelihood of producing a left-dislocation in both optimal (French) and sub-optimal (English) discourse contexts. Overall, the processing account considers the possibility of bi-directional CLI in any language combination as a result of the interaction Determiner development in French-English children 5 between the two competing linguistic systems.…”