Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T04:59:40.629Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Dislocations in French–English bilingual children: An elicitation study*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

CORALIE HERVÉ ,
LUDOVICA SERRATRICE  and
MARTIN CORLEY
CORALIE HERVÉ
Affiliation:
University of Manchester, Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7
LUDOVICA SERRATRICE*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
MARTIN CORLEY
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
Address for correspondence: Dr Ludovica Serratrice, The University of Manchester, School of Psychological Sciences, Ellen Wilkinson Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PLserratrice@manchester.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper presents the results of two sentence production studies addressing the role of language exposure, prior linguistic modelling and discourse-pragmatic appropriateness on the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilingual 5-year-olds. We investigated whether French–English bilingual children would be as likely as monolingual children to use a left-dislocation structure in the description of a target scene. We also examined whether input quantity played a role in the degree of accessibility of these syntactic constructions across languages. While the results indicate a significant effect of elicitation condition only in French, the relative amount of language exposure in each language predicted the likelihood of producing a left-dislocation in both French and English. These findings make a new contribution to the role of language exposure as a predictor of CLI. The data also support the recent proposal that CLI arises out of processing mechanisms.

Keywords

bilingual first language acquisitioncross-linguistic influencelanguage processingdiscourse-pragmatics
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Issue 5 , November 2016 , pp. 987 - 1000
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We gratefully acknowledge the staff and children at Collège Bilingue Français de Londres, La Petite Ecole Bilingue (London and Paris), L’Ermitage (Paris), Beaver School (Manchester) and L’Ecole Maternelle rue Saint-Jacques (Paris) for their enthusiastic collaboration.

References

Argyri, E., & Sorace, A. (2007). Crosslinguistic influence and language dominance in older bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10 (1), 79–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnes, J., & Garcia, I. (2013). Vocabulary growth and composition in monolingual and bilingual Basque infants and toddlers. International Journal of Bilingualism, 17 (3), 357–374.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnes, B. (1985). The pragmatics of left detachment in spoken standard French. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2013). Package ‘lme4’.Google Scholar
Bernolet, S., Hartsuiker, R., & Pickering, M. (2007). Shared syntactic representations in bilinguals: Evidence for the role of word-order repetition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33 (5), 931.Google ScholarPubMed
Blasco-Dulbecco, M. (1999). Les dislocations en français contemporain. Paris: Champion.Google Scholar
Blom, E. (2010). Effects of input on the early grammatical development of bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 14 (4), 422–446.Google Scholar
Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive psychology, 18 (3), 355–387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Branigan, H. (2007). Syntactic priming. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1 (1–2), 1–16.Google Scholar
Cattani, A., Abbot-Smith, K., Farag, R., Krott, A., Arreckx, F., Dennis, I., & Floccia, C. (2014). How much exposure to English is necessary for a bilingual toddler to perform like a monolingual peer in language tests?. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 49 (6), 649–671.Google Scholar
De Cat, C. (2002). French dislocations: PhD dissertation, University of York.Google Scholar
De Cat, C. (2009). Experimental Evidence for Preschoolers’ Mastery of “Topic”. Language Acquisition, 16 (4), 224–239.Google Scholar
De Cat, C., Berends, S., & Serratrice, L. (2015, May). Are there executive function advantages for bilingual children?. Paper presented at the 10th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Rutgers University.Google Scholar
Delais-Roussarie, E., Doetjes, J., & Sleeman, P. (2004). Dislocation. In Corblin, F. & de Swart, H. (Eds.), Handbook of French semantics (pp. 501–528). Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
Desmet, T., & Declercq, M. (2006). Cross-linguistic priming of syntactic hierarchical configuration information. Journal of Memory and Language, 54 (4), 610–632.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donaldson, B. (2011). Left-dislocation in near-native French. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33 (3), 399–432.Google Scholar
Döpke, S. (1998). Competing language structures: The acquisition of verb placement by bilingual German-English children. Journal of Child Language, 25 (3), 555–584.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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V.C.M., & Hoff, E. (2007). Input and the acquisition of language: Three questions. In Hoff, E. & Shatz, M. (eds), Blackwell handbook of language development, 107–127. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Geluykens, R. (1992). From discourse process to grammatical construction: On left dislocation in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Gregory, M. L., & Michaelis, L. A. (2001). Topicalization and left-dislocation: A functional opposition revisited. Journal of Pragmatics, 33 (11), 1665–1706.Google Scholar
Hacohen, A., & Schaeffer, J. (2007). Subject realization in early Hebrew/English bilingual acquisition: The role of crosslinguistic influence. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10 (3), 333.Google Scholar
Hammer, C. S., Davison, M. D., Lawrence, F. R., & Miccio, A. W. (2009). The effect of maternal language on bilingual children's vocabulary and emergent literacy development during Head Start and kindergarten. Scientific Studies of Reading, 13 (2), 99–121.Google Scholar
Hammer, C. S., Komaroff, E., Rodriguez, B. L., Lopez, L. M., Scarpino, S. E., & Goldstein, B. (2012). Predicting Spanish–English bilingual children's language abilities. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 55 (5), 1251–1264.Google Scholar
Hartsuiker, R. J., Pickering, M. J., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish–English bilinguals. Psychological Science, 15 (6), 409–414.Google Scholar
Hartsuiker, R. J., & Pickering, M. J. (2008). Language integration in bilingual sentence production. Acta Psychologica, 128 (3), 479–489.Google Scholar
Hauser-Grüdl, N., Arencibia Guerra, L., Witzmann, F., Leray, E., & Müller, N. (2010). Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children: Can input frequency account for it? Lingua, 120 (11), 2638–2650.Google Scholar
Hervé, C. (2014). French–English bilingual children's encoding of old and new information: PhD dissertation, University of Manchester.Google Scholar
Hoff, E., Core, C., Place, S., Rumiche, R., Senor, M., & Parra, M. (2012). Dual language exposure and early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language, 39 (1), 1–27.Google Scholar
Hsin, L., Legendre, G., & Omaki, A. (2013). Priming cross-linguistic interference in Spanish–English bilingual children. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.Google Scholar
Hulk, A., & Müller, N. (2000). Bilingual first language acquisition at the interface between syntax and pragmatics. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3 (03), 227–244.Google Scholar
Kidd, E. (2012). Individual differences in syntactic priming in language acquisition. Applied Psycholinguistics, 33 (2), 393–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kidd, E., Chan, A., & Chiu, J. (2014). Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous Cantonese–English bilingual children's comprehension of relative clauses. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18 (3), 438–452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kupisch, T. (2007). Determiners in bilingual German–Italian children: What they tell us about the relation between language influence and language dominance. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10 (1), 57–78.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, K. (1981). Topic, antitopic and verb agreement in non-standard French. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information structure and sentence form: topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, K. (2001). Dislocation. In Haspelmath, M., König, E., Oesterreicher, W., & Raible, W. (Eds.), Language typology and language universals: An international handbook. (pp. 1050–1078). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Loebell, H., & Bock, K. (2003). Structural priming across languages. Linguistics, 41 (5), 791–824.Google Scholar
Marchman, V. A., & Martinez-Sussmann, D. (2002). Concurrent validity of caregiver/parent report measure of language for children who are learning both English and Spanish. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 45 (5), 983–997.Google Scholar
Marchman, V.A., Martinez-Sussmann, C., & Dale, P.S. (2004). The language-specific nature of grammatical development: Evidence from bilingual language learners. Developmental Science, 7 (2), 212–224.Google Scholar
Messenger, K., Branigan, H. P., McLean, J. F., & Sorace, A. (2012). Is young children's passive syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 66 (4), 568–587.CrossRefGoogle 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
Nicoladis, E. (2012). Cross-linguistic influence in French–English bilingual children's possessive constructions. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15 (2), 320–328.Google Scholar
Nicoladis, E., & Paradis, J. (2011). Learning to liaise and elide comme il faut: evidence from bilingual children. Journal of Child Language, 38 (4), 701–730.Google Scholar
Nicoladis, E., Rose, A., & Foursha-Stevenson, C. (2010). Thinking for speaking and cross-linguistic transfer in preschool bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13 (3), 345–370.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Notley, A., van der Linden, E., & Hulk, A. (2007). Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children: the case of dislocation. In Baauw, S., Drijkoningen, F., & Pinto, M. (Eds.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory (pp. 229–258). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Ochs-Keenan, E., & Schieffelin, B. (1976). Foregrounding referents: a reconsideration of left dislocation in discourse Proceedings of Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (Vol. 2, pp. 240–257).Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2011). Individual differences in child English second language acquisition: Comparing child-internal and child-external factors. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1 (3), 213–237.CrossRefGoogle 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
Paradis, J., Nicoladis, E., Crago, M., & Genesee, F. (2011). Bilingual children's acquisition of the past tense: A usage-based approach. Journal of Child Language, 38 (3), 554–578.Google Scholar
Patterson, J. (2002). Relationships of expressive vocabulary to frequency of reading and television experience among bilingual toddlers. Applied Psycholinguistics, 23 (4), 493–508.Google Scholar
Pinto, M. (2006). Subject pronouns in bilinguals: Interference or maturation? In Torrens, V. & Escobar, L. (Eds.), The acquisition of syntax in Romance languages (pp. 331–350). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pirvulescu, M., Pérez-Leroux, A., & Roberge, Y. (2012). A bidirectional study of object omissions in French–English bilinguals. In Braunmüller, K. & Gabriel, C. (Eds.), Multilingual individuals and multilingual societies (pp. 171–188). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Pirvulescu, M., Pérez-Leroux, A., Roberge, Y., Strik, N., & Thomas, D. (2014). Bilingual effects: Exploring object omission in pronominal languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17 (3), 495–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Place, S., & Hoff, E. (2011). Properties of dual language exposure that influence 2 year olds’ bilingual proficiency. Child Development, 82 (6), 1834–1849.Google Scholar
Prince, E. (1981). Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Cole, P. (Ed.), Radical pragmatics (pp. 223–255). New York: New York Academic Press.Google Scholar
Savage, C., Lieven, E., Theakston, A., & Tomasello, M. (2003). Testing the abstractness of children's linguistic representations: Lexical and structural priming of syntactic constructions in young children. Developmental Science, 6 (5), 557–567.Google Scholar
Schmid, M. S. (2010). Languages at play: The relevance of L1 attrition to the study of bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13 (1), 1–7.Google Scholar
Schoonbaert, S., Hartsuiker, R. J., & Pickering, M. J. (2007). The representation of lexical and syntactic information in bilinguals: Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 56 (2), 153–171.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
Serratrice, L. (2013). Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual development: Determinants and mechanisms. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 3 (1), 3–25.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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serratrice, L., Sorace, A., Filiaci, F., & Baldo, M. (2011). Pronominal objects in English–Italian and Spanish–Italian bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 33 (4), 725.CrossRefGoogle 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: Language and Cognition, 7 (3), 183–206.Google Scholar
Shimpi, P. M., Gámez, P. B., Huttenlocher, J., & Vasilyeva, M. (2007). Syntactic priming in 3-and 4-year-old children: Evidence for abstract representations of transitive and dative forms. Developmental Psychology, 43 (6), 1334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skarabela, B., & Serratrice, L. (2009). ‘The doctor's mother’ or ‘the mother of the doctor’?: Syntactic priming of possessive noun phrases in English preschoolers Online Supplement of the Proceedings of the 33rd BUCLD.Google Scholar
Smithson, L., Paradis, J., & Nicoladis, E. (2014). Bilingualism and receptive vocabulary achievement: Could sociocultural context make a difference?. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17 (4), 810–821.Google Scholar
Snider, N., & Zaenen, A. (2006). Animacy and syntactic structure: Fronted NPs in English. Intelligent Linguistic Architectures: Variations on Themes by Ronald M. Kaplan. CSLI Publications, Stanford.Google Scholar
Sorace, A., & Serratrice, L. (2009). Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development: Beyond structural overlap. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13 (2), 195–210.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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sundara, M., & Scutellaro, A. (2011). Rhythmic distance between languages affects the development of speech perception in bilingual infants. Journal of Phonetics, 39 (4), 505–513.Google Scholar
Team, R. C. (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.Google Scholar
Thordardottir, E. (2011). The relationship between bilingual exposure and vocabulary development. International Journal of Bilingualism, 15 (4), 426–445.Google Scholar
Thothathiri, M., & Snedeker, J. (2008). Give and take: Syntactic priming during spoken language comprehension. Cognition, 108 (1), 51–68.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, I., Sorace, A., Heycock, C., & Filiaci, F. (2004). First language attrition and syntactic subjects: A study of Greek and Italian near-native speakers of English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 8 (3), 257–277.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S. (2013). Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16 (01), 86–110.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S. (2014). Amount of exposure as a proxy for dominance in bilingual language acquisition. In Silva-Corvalán, C. & Treffers-Daller, J. (Eds.), Language dominance in bilinguals: Issues of measurement and operationalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vasilyeva, M., Waterfall, H., Gamez, P. B., Gomez, L. E., Bowers, E., & Shimpi, P. (2010). Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in bilingual children. Journal of Child Language, 37 (5), 1047.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Hervé supplementary material

Appendix

Download Hervé supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 81 KB