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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
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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 

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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.

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