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

Helen Engemann

doi:10.1017/s1366728921000298

Abstract

AbstractSimultaneous bilingual children sometimes display crosslinguistic influence (CLI), widely attested in the domain of morphosyntax. It remains less clear whether CLI affects bilinguals’ event construal, what motivates its occurrence and directionality, and how developmentally persistent it is. The present study tested predictions generated by the structural overlap hypothesis and the co-activation account in the motion event domain. 96 English–French bilingual children of two age groups and 96 age-matched monolingual English and French controls were asked to describe animated videos displaying voluntary motion events. Semantic encoding in main verbs showed bidirectional CLI. Unidirectional CLI affected French path encoding in the verbal periphery and was predicted by the presence of boundary-crossing, despite the absence of structural overlap. Furthermore, CLI increased developmentally in the French data. It is argued that these findings reflect highly dynamic co-activation patterns sensitive to the requirements of the task and to language-specific challenges in the online production process.

Highlights

It is widely acknowledged that the human mind is well equipped to acquire and handle two or more languages
The present study aims to contribute to closing these research gaps by addressing the role of age and language-specific semantic constraints in the context of motion events in English–French bilingual children
The structures of interest are situated at vulnerable interfaces, between syntax and discourse-pragmatics that are known to be problematic in monolingual L1 acquisition

Summary

Introduction

It is widely acknowledged that the human mind is well equipped to acquire and handle two or more languages. The evidence available to date suggests that children’s construal of their L1 semantic categories is guided by non-linguistic cognitive factors, and by language-specific properties, which has been attested across various semantic fields and in typologically diverse languages (Bowerman, 1996a, 1996b; Bowerman & Choi, 2001; Choi, 2006; Hickmann, Hendriks & Champaud, 2009) These findings raise the question as to how CLI plays out in simultaneous bilinguals’ semantic and conceptual development. The structures of interest are situated at vulnerable interfaces, between syntax and discourse-pragmatics that are known to be problematic in monolingual L1 acquisition Fulfilment of these two necessary (though not sufficient) conditions Some studies have reported an absence of CLI when both linguistic conditions are met (e.g., Nicoladis et al, 2010), undermining their predictive value

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