Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T04:25:44.488Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in object realization in Cantonese–English bilingual children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2020

Jiangling Zhou Open the ORCID record for Jiangling Zhou [Opens in a new window] ,
Ziyin Mai  and
Virginia Yip
Jiangling Zhou*
Affiliation:
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Ziyin Mai
Affiliation:
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Virginia Yip
Affiliation:
Chinese University of Hong Kong
*
Address for correspondence: Jiangling Zhou, E-mail: zhoujiangling@link.cuhk.edu.hk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study reports a production experiment investigating the realization of objects with different verb types in controlled discourse contexts in 68 three- to seven-year-old sequential Cantonese–English bilingual children. The results show the bilingual children behaved similarly to the Cantonese monolingual peers in object omission, but exhibited protracted development and produced target-deviant forms following a Cantonese pattern in omitting objects specified in prior discourse in English. The bilingual children also showed non-target-like uses of the Cantonese post-verbal object pronoun keoi5, which were unattested in monolingual children. Our findings show evidence for bidirectional cross-linguistic influence: the direction of influence goes from the weaker to the stronger language and from the stronger to the weaker language. Vulnerability of object realization in bilingual acquisition can be better understood in terms of the interaction between cross-linguistic influence, input (e.g., quantity and structural frequencies) and other linguistic elements involved in the interface relation (e.g., verb type).

Keywords

object omissionobject pronounCantonese–English bilingual childrencross-linguistic influence
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 96 - 110
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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.)

References

Bates, D, Maechler, M, Bolker, B, & Walker, S (2015) Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67, 1–48. DOI: 10.18637/jss.v067.i01.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloom, L, Hood, L, & Lightbown, P (1974) Imitation in language development: If, when and why. Cognitive Psychology 6, 380–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, R (1973) A first language: The early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, P (2009) Aspect of referentiality. Journal of Pragmatics 41, 1657–1674.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheung, PSP, Lee, KYS, & Lee, LWT (1997) The development of the ‘Cantonese Receptive Vocabulary Test’ for children aged 2–6 in Hong Kong. European Journal of Disorders of Communication 32, 127–138.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cheung, SHN (1992) The pretransitive in Cantonese. Zhongguo Jingnei Yuyan ji Yuyanxue: Hanyu Fangyan [Chinese languages and linguistics: Chinese dialects], 1, 241–303.Google Scholar
Cummins, S, & Roberge, Y (2005) A modular account of null objects in French. Syntax 8, 44–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demetras, M (1989) Working parents’ conversational responses to their two-year-old sons. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Arizona, US.Google Scholar
Duff, FJ, Reen, G, Plunkett, K, & Nation, K (2015) Do infant vocabulary skills predict school-age language and literacy outcomes? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 56, 848–856.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dunn, M, & Dunn, LM (2007) Peabody picture vocabulary test-4. Circle Pines, MN: AGS.Google Scholar
Givón, T (1978) Definiteness and referentiality. In Greenberg, JH (ed), Universals of human language (vol. 4). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 291–330.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A (2001) Patient arguments of causative verbs can be omitted: The role of information structure in argument distribution. Language Sciences 23, 503–524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartsuiker, RJ, Pickering, MJ, & Veltkamp, E (2004) Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish-English bilinguals. Psychological Science 15, 409–414.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huang, C-TJ (1984) On the distribution and reference of empty pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 15, 531–574.Google Scholar
Hulk, A (2017) Note on CI: Back to “MULK”. In Blom, E, Cornips, L, and Schaeffer, J (eds), Cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 15–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hulk, A & Müller, N (2000) Bilingual first language acquisition at the interface between syntax and pragmatics. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3, 227–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingham, R (1993/1994). Input and learnability: Direct object omissibility in English. Language Acquisition 3, 95–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kupisch, T, Belikova, A, Özçelik, Ö, Stangen, I, & White, L (2017) Restrictions on definiteness in the grammars of German-Turkish heritage speakers. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7, 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, THT, Wong, CH, Leung, S, Man, P, Cheung, A, Szeto, K, & Wong, CSP (1996) The development of grammatical competence in Cantonese-speaking children. Report of RGC earmarked grant 1991–94.Google Scholar
Li, DCS (2017) Multilingual Hong Kong: Languages, literacies and identities. Cham: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liu, F-H (1997) An aspectual analysis of BA. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 6, 51–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Man, Y-H, P. (1998) Postverbal KEOI as a marker for nonasserted bounded clauses. In Matthews, S (ed), Studies in Cantonese Linguistics. Hong Kong: Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, pp. 53–62.Google Scholar
Martí, L (2006) Unarticulated constituents revisited. Linguistics and Philosophy 29, 135–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matthews, S (2006) On serial verbs in Cantonese. In Aikhenvald, A & Dixon, RMW (eds), Serial verbs: A cross-linguistic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 69–87.Google Scholar
Matthews, S, & Yip, V (2011) Cantonese: A comprehensive grammar (2nd edition). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Matuschek, H, Kliegl, R, Vasishth, S, Baayen, H, & Bates, D (2017) Balancing Type I error and power in linear mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language 94, 305–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, N (1998) Transfer in bilingual first language acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1, 151–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, N, & Hulk, A (2001) Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mykhaylyk, R, & Ytterstad, E (2017) Directionality of cross-linguistic influence: Which referring choices do bilingual Ukrainian–English children make? International Journal of Bilingualism 21, 99–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Grady, W, Yamashita, Y, & Cho, S (2008) Object drop in Japanese and Korean. Language Acquisition 15, 58–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A, Pirvulescu, M, & Roberge, Y (2008) Null objects in child language: Syntax and the lexicon. Lingua 118, 370–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A, Pirvulescu, M, & Roberge, Y (2018) Direct objects and language acquisition. (Cambridge studies in linguistics 152.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pirvulescu, M, Pérez-Leroux, AT, Roberge, Y, Strik, N, & Thomas, D (2014) Bilingual effects: Exploring object omission in pronominal languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 17, 495–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team (2018) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL http://www.R-project.org/.Google Scholar
Schaeffer, JC (2000) The acquisition of direct object scrambling and clitic placement: Syntax and pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schoonbaert, S, Hartsuiker, RJ, & Pickering, MJ (2007) The representation of lexical and syntactic information in bilinguals: Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and Language 56, 153–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serratrice, L (2013) Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual development. Determinants and mechanisms. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 3, 3–25.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, 83–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stæhr, LS (2008) Vocabulary size and the skills of listening, reading and writing. Language Learning Journal 36, 139–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Gompel, R, & Arai, M (2018) Structural priming in bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 21, 448–455.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yip, V, & Matthews, S (2005) Dual input and learnability: Null objects in Cantonese–English bilingual children. In Cohen, J, McAlister, KT, Rolstad, K & MacSwan, J (eds), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, pp. 2421–2431.Google Scholar
Yip, V, & Matthews, S (2007) The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yuan, B (2010) Domain-wide or variable-dependent vulnerability of the semantics-syntax interface in L2 acquisition? Evidence from wh-words used as existential polarity words in L2 Chinese grammars. Second Language Research 26, 219–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhao, LX (2012) Interpretation of Chinese overt and null embedded arguments by English-speaking learners. Second Language Research 28, 169–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhou, J, Mai, Z, & Yip, V (2015) Object omission in Cantonese–English Bilingual Children. Presented at the 10th International Symposium of Bilingualism, Rutgers University, New Jersey, US.Google Scholar
Zhou, J, Mai, Z, & Yip, V (2016) A corpus study of post-verbal KEOI in Cantonese–English bilingual children. Presented at the 28th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, US.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Zhou et al. supplementary material

Tables S1-S4 and Figures S1-S3

Download Zhou et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 368.9 KB