The impact of typological factors in monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition

Abstract

The present study compares (1) monolingual English vs. French adults and children and (2) simultaneous French-English bilingual children who describe caused motion events. The results concerning L1 speakers showed developmental progressions in both languages, e.g. utterance complexity increases with age. However, response patterns differed considerably across languages in that responses were denser and more compact in English than in French. The results concerning bilingual children showed unidirectional crosslinguistic interactions. Responses elicited in English paralleled monolingual developmental patterns, whereas bilinguals’ French productions differed from those of monolingual French peers. The findings suggest that bilingual children transfer lexicalisation patterns from one of their languages to the other when the former provides more transparent means of achieving high semantic density.

How (not) to cross a boundary: Crosslinguistic influence in simultaneous bilingual children's event construal

“…Note that Miller et al's (2018) analysis is based on the overall encoding of path and manner, without distinguishing between verbs and satellites. Our own previous research on the acquisition of caused motion expression in early successive and simultaneous English-French bilingual children (Engemann, 2012(Engemann, , 2016Harr & Engemann, 2011) suggested prolific asymmetric CLI in the opposite direction from what was reported in Miller et al (2018). Bilinguals' French descriptions showed evidence of pervasive influence from English S-framing strategies, whereas English expressions showed little influence from French.…”