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Subject realization in early Hebrew/English bilingual acquisition: The role of crosslinguistic influence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2007

AVIYA HACOHEN  and
JEANNETTE SCHAEFFER
AVIYA HACOHEN
Affiliation:
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
JEANNETTE SCHAEFFER
Affiliation:
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
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Abstract

This study reports on the use of (c)overt subjects and subject–verb agreement in Hebrew in the spontaneous speech of a child, EK, acquiring Hebrew and English simultaneously from birth and of five slightly younger Hebrew monolingual controls. Analysis shows that EK's production of pragmatically inappropriate overt subjects is more than three times that of the controls, while she resembles the controls in terms of subject–verb agreement, a purely syntactic phenomenon. These results strongly suggest that influence from English is restricted to phenomena that involve the syntax/pragmatics interface, supporting Hulk and Müller's (2000) hypothesis that crosslinguistic influence in early bilingual acquisition is a predictable and systematic phenomenon.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , November 2007 , pp. 333 - 344
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2007

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Footnotes

This research was made possible by a grant from the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Ben-Gurion University. We thank our research subject EK, her mother, father and sister for their cooperation, time and patience, and for hosting us in their house during the many recording sessions.