Crosslinguistic influence in two directions: The acquisition of dative constructions in Cantonese—English bilingual children

Abstract

Previous studies suggest that language dominance and input ambiguity are the two major determinants of crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition. This article reports a case of bi-directional crosslinguistic transfer in the acquisition of dative constructions by Cantonese—English bilingual children. Longitudinal data of five bilingual children reveal qualitative and quantitative differences between bilingual and monolingual children in the development of English prepositional datives and Cantonese inverted double object datives. Individual differences among the five bilingual children largely correspond to their language dominance patterns, and input ambiguity also helps to explain some transfer effects. It is found that crosslinguistic influence is most likely to take place at vulnerable domains in language acquisition, and a great deal of the interaction between the two languages is observed in such domains. The findings suggest that crosslinguistic influence is pervasive in both directions of bilingual acquisition.