Abstract
This study investigates the choice of genitive forms (the woman’s book vs. the book of the woman) in the English of Japanese-English bilingual returnees (i.e., children who returned from a second language dominant environment to their first language environment). The specific aim was to examine whether change in language dominance/exposure influences choice of genitive form in the bilingual children; the more general question was the extent to which observed behavior can be explained by cross linguistic influence (CLI). First, we compared the choice of genitive form between monolingual English speakers and bilinguals who had recently returned to Japan from an English speaking environment. Second, we tracked changes in genitive preference within bilingual children, comparing their performances upon return to Japan to those of one year later. Results show that CLI alone is insufficient to explain the difference in genitive evaluation between bilinguals and monolinguals, as well as the intra-group bilingual variation over time. We suggest that both CLI and general processing considerations couple together to influence the changes in genitive preference.
Highlights
Studies examining cross-linguistic influence (CLI) provide valuable data for fully understanding how both languages of bilinguals develop and interact over time
The fact that the monolinguals were predominantly exposed to British English in the United Kingdom, while the bilingual group were exposed to different varieties of English dialects may have had some effects on the observed differences in genitive preference between monolinguals and bilinguals
Given that the use of s-genitive with inanimate nouns has been found to be more common in American English than British English (Rosenbach, 2001, 2002, 2003; Hinrichs and Szmrecsanyi, 2007; Szmrecsanyi and Hinrichs, 2008), one could expect monolinguals to choose less s-genitives with inanimate possessor than the bilinguals, in which at least one-third of them were predominantly exposed to American−English
Summary
Studies examining (potential) cross-linguistic influence (CLI) provide valuable data for fully understanding how both languages of bilinguals develop and interact over time. We define CLI as influence on behavior exhibited by bilinguals that can reasonably be attributed to their other language, that is, not otherwise explainable by developmental processes noted in monolingual language development (be it delay or acceleration). Japanese learners of English may produce phrases such as sale’s spelling (rather than the spelling of “sale”)−a form that is rarely observed in a developmental stage of English monolingual speakers (Tomiyama, 2000). This behavior can reasonably be attributed to CLI from L1 Japanese due to the fact that Japanese only allows pre-nominal possessive construction that linearly maps onto the English s-genitive form. Others (Müller and Hulk, 2001; Paradis and Navarro, 2003; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006) have instead proposed that the linguistic properties of the two languages−namely, structural overlap and interface condition, discussed further below−determine the occurrence and the directionality of CLI
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