Cover not available

In:Cross-language Influences in Bilingual Processing and Second Language Acquisition:
Edited by Irina Elgort, Anna Siyanova-Chanturia and Marc Brysbaert
[Bilingual Processing and Acquisition 16] 2023
► pp. 294–315

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 12
Cross-linguistic influences in bilingual morphosyntactic acquisition

 | University of Edinburgh
Published online: 1 May 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/bpa.16.12cho
Abstract
The interaction between the bilingual child’s two languages, coined as Cross-linguistic influence (CLI), is a well-reported phenomenon in bilingual language development. Although CLI has long dominated bilingualism research, issues about its nature (a representational change or by-product of language co-activation), timing and duration remain less well understood. Is CLI only observed during early bilingual development, and does it fade away as children grow older? Does it lead to qualitative and quantitative differences in language development between bilinguals and monolinguals? The present chapter addresses these questions by reviewing state-of-the-art studies reporting CLI in simultaneous and sequential bilingual children’s acquisition of morphology and syntax. We also discuss how extra-linguistic factors such as age of acquisition, dominance, input quality and quantity modulate CLI.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Defining CLI
  • 3.Linguistic conditions for CLI
    • 3.1Interface phenomena and CLI
    • 3.2Surface overlap and CLI
  • 4.Nature of CLI: Representation vs. processing
    • 4.1Representations and CLI
    • 4.2Representational differences in the absence of transfer: Economy principles
    • 4.3CLI as a by-product of co-activation and priming of the two languages
    • 4.4Parsing strategies and CLI
  • 5.Individual factors modulating CLI
    • 5.1Age
    • 5.2Dominance
    • 5.3Input quantity and quality and CLI
    • 5.4CLI and language co-activation as drivers for language change
  • 6.Concluding remarks and future research
  • Notes
  • References
References (61)
References
Argyri, E., & Sorace, A. (2007). Crosslinguistic influence and language dominance in older bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10(1), 79. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bosch, J. E., & Unsworth, S. (2021). Cross-linguistic influence in word order. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 11(6), 783–816. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chan, A. (2010). The Cantonese double object construction with bei2 ‘give’ in bilingual children: The role of input. International Journal of Bilingualism, 14(1), 65–85. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Choi, Y., & Trueswell, J. C. (2010). Children’s (in)ability to recover from garden paths in a verb-final language: evidence for developing control in sentence processing. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 106(1), 41–61. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chondrogianni, V., & Schwartz, R. G. (2020). Case marking and word order in Greek heritage children. Journal of Child Language, 47(4), 766–795. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Daskalaki, E., Blom, E., Chondrogianni, V., & Paradis, J. (2020). Effects of parental input quality in child heritage language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 47(4), 709–736. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Daskalaki, E., Chondrogianni, V., Blom, E., Argyri, F., & Paradis, J. (2019). Input effects across domains: The case of Greek subjects in child heritage language. Second Language Research, 35(3), 421–445. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Flores, C. (2019). Language development in bilingual returnees. In M. S. Schmid & B. Köpke (Eds.), Oxford handbook of language attrition (pp. 493–501). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Flores, C., & Barbosa, P. (2012). When reduced input leads to delayed acquisition: A study on the acquisition of clitic placement by Portuguese heritage speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism, 18(3), 304–325. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Foroodi-Nejad, F., & Paradis, J. (2009). Crosslinguistic transfer in the acquisition of compound words in Persian–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(4), 411–427. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fricke, M., & Kootstra, G. J. (2016). Primed codeswitching in spontaneous bilingual dialogue. Journal of Memory and Language, 91, 181–201. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gavarró, A. (2003). Economy and word order patterns in bilingual English-Dutch acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition Language and Cognition, 6(1), 69–79. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Genesee, F. (1989). Early bilingual development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language, 16(1), 161–179. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Green, D. W., & Abutalebi, J. (2013). Language control in bilinguals: The adaptive control hypothesis. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 25(5), 515–530. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, S. T., & Kootstra, G. J. (2017). Structural priming within and across languages: A corpus-based perspective. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(2), 235–250. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hervé, C., & Serratrice, L. (2018). The development of determiners in the context of French–English bilingualism: a study of cross-linguistic influence. Journal of Child Language, 45(3), 767–787. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hervé, C., Serratrice, L., & Corley, M. (2016). Dislocations in French–English bilingual children: An elicitation study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19(5), 987–1000. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Houwer, A. De. (1990). The acquisition of two languages from birth. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hsin, L., Legendre, G., & Omaki, A. (2013). Priming cross-linguistic interference in Spanish-English bilingual children. In S. Baiz, N. Goldman, & R. Hawkes (Eds.), BUCLD 37: Proceedings of the 37th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 165–177). Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kidd, E., Chan, A., & Chiu, J. (2015). Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous Cantonese–English bilingual children’s comprehension of relative clauses. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(3), 438–452. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kootstra, G. J., & Şahin, H. (2018). Crosslinguistic structural priming as a mechanism of contact-induced language change: Evidence from Papiamento-Dutch bilinguals in Aruba and the Netherlands. Language, 94(4), 902–930. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kootstra, G. J., van Hell, J. G., & Dijkstra, T. (2010). Syntactic alignment and shared word order in code-switched sentence production: Evidence from bilingual monologue and dialogue. Journal of Memory and Language, 63(2), 210–231. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kubota, M., Chondrogianni, V., Clark, A. S., & Rothman, J. (2021). Linguistic consequences of toing and froing: factors that modulate narrative development in bilingual returnee children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 25(7), 2363–2381. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kupisch, T. (2019). 2L1 simultaneous bilinguals as heritage speakers. In M. S. Schmid & B. Köpke (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language attrition (pp. 458–469). Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mai, Z., Kwan, C., & Yip, V. (2016). Expressing displacement in heritage Cantonese: Cross-linguistic influence and structural vulnerability. International Journal of Bilingualism, 22(6), 603–618. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mai, Z., Zhao, L., & Yip, V. (2021). The Mandarin ba-construction in school-age heritage speakers and their parental input. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 12(3), 377–405. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (2001). The simultaneous acquisition of two first languages. In Trends in bilingual acquisition (pp. 11–41). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2007). On autonomous syntactic development in multiple first language acquisition. In H. Caunt-Nulton (Ed.), BUCLD 31: Proceedings of the 31st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 26–45). Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M., Elsig, M., & Rinke, E. (2013). Acquisition in multilingual settings: Implications for explanations of change. In E. Rinke, J. Meisel, & M. Elsig (Eds.), Language acquisition and change: A morphosyntactic perspective (pp. 137–165). Edinburgh University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Montrul, S. (2015). The acquisition of heritage languages. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Müller, N., & Hulk, A. (2001). Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4(1), 1–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nicoladis, E. (2006). Cross-linguistic transfer in adjective–noun strings by preschool bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9(1), 15–32. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2012). Cross-linguistic influence in French–English bilingual children’s possessive constructions. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(2), 320–328. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Omaki, A., Davidson White, I., Goro, T., Lidz, J., & Phillips, C. (2014). No fear of commitment: Children’s incremental interpretation in English and Japanese wh-questions. Language Learning and Development, 10(3), 206–233. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Omaki, A., & Lidz, J. (2015). Linking parser development to acquisition of syntactic knowledge. Language Acquisition, 22(2), 158–192. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Paradis, J., & Genesee, F. (1996). Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or interdependent? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18(1), 1–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Paradis, J., & Navarro, S. (2003). Subject realization and crosslinguistic interference in the bilingual acquisition of Spanish and English: what is the role of the input? Journal of Child Language, 30(2), 371–393. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Place, S., & Hoff, E. (2016). Effects and noneffects of input in bilingual environments on dual language skills in 2 ½-year-olds. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19(5), 1023–1041. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schmid, M. S., & Köpke, B. (2017). The relevance of first language attrition to theories of bilingual development. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7(6), 637–667. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Serratrice, L. (2007). Cross-linguistic influence in the interpretation of anaphoric and cataphoric pronouns in English–Italian bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10(3), 225–238. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2013). Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual development. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 3(1), 3–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Serratrice, L., Sorace, A., Filiaci, F., & Baldo, M. (2009). Bilingual children’s sensitivity to specificity and genericity: Evidence from metalinguistic awareness. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(2), 239–257. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2012). Pronominal objects in English–Italian and Spanish–Italian bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 33(4), 725–751. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Serratrice, L., Sorace, A., & Paoli, S. (2004). Crosslinguistic influence at the syntax-pragmatics interface: Subjects and objects in English-Italian bilingual and monolingual acquisition. Bilingualism, 7(3), 183–205. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sorace, A. (2011). Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(1), 1–33. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2016). Referring expressions and executive functions in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 6(5), 669–684. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2019). Referring expressions and executive functions in bilingualism. In I. A. Sekerina, L. Spradlin, & V. Valian (Eds.), Bilingualism, executive function, and beyond: Questions and insights (pp. 131–146). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sorace, A., & Filiaci, F. (2006). Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Language Research, 22(3), 339–368. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sorace, A., Serratrice, L., Filiaci, F., & Baldo, M. (2009). Discourse conditions on subject pronoun realization: Testing the linguistic intuitions of older bilingual children. Lingua, 119(3), 460–477. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stoehr, A., Benders, T., van Hell, J. G., & Fikkert, P. (2019). Bilingual preschoolers’ speech is associated with non-native maternal language input. Language Learning and Development, 15(1), 75–100. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Strik, N., & Pérez-Leroux, A. T. (2011). Jij doe wat girafe? Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(2), 175–205. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sunderman, G., & Kroll, J. F. (2006). First Language activation during second language lexical processing: An investigation of lexical form, meaning, and grammatical class. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28(3), 387–422. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Travis, C. E., Torres Cacoullos, R., & Kidd, E. (2017). Cross-language priming: A view from bilingual speech. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(2), 283–298. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Unsworth, S. (2003). Testing Hulk & Müller (2000) on crosslinguistic influence: Root infinitives in a bilingual German/English child. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6(2), 143–158. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Unsworth, S., Chondrogianni, V., & Skarabela, B. (2018). Experiential measures can be Used as a proxy for language dominance in bilingual language acquisition research. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1809. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Dijk, C., van Wonderen, E., Koutamanis, E., Kootstra, G. J., Dijkstra, T., & Unsworth, S. (2021). Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children: A meta-analysis. Journal of Child Language, 1–33. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vasilyeva, M., Waterfall, H., Gámez, P. B., Gómez, L. E., Bowers, E., & Shimpi, P. (2010). Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in bilingual children. Journal of Child Language, 37(5), 1047–1064. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Volterra, V., & Taeschner, T. (1978). The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children. Journal of Child Language, 5(2), 311–326. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
White, L. (2003). Universal grammar and second language acquisition. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Daskalaki, Evangelia, Aretousa Giannakou, Christina Haska & Vasiliki Chondrogianni
2025. Switching the majority language: The case of heritage Greek in North and South America. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Hao, Jiuzhou, Maki Kubota, Fatih Bayram, Jorge González Alonso, Theres Grüter, Muhan Li & Jason Rothman
2025. Schooling and language usage matter in heritage bilingual processing: Sortal classifiers in Mandarin. Second Language Research 41:4 ► pp. 649 ff. DOI logo
Rizou, Vasiliki, Despina Papadopoulou, Onur Özsoy, Artemis Alexiadou & Laura Morett
2025. Novel forms for the expression of aspect in heritage Greek across majority languages. PLOS One 20:5 ► pp. e0319154 ff. DOI logo
Tusun, Alimujiang
2024. Uyghur–Chinese early successive bilingual children's acquisition of voluntary motion expressions. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 27:4 ► pp. 642 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue