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Cross-linguistic transfer in adjective–noun strings by preschool bilingual children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2006

ELENA NICOLADIS
ELENA NICOLADIS
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Abstract

One hypothesis holds that bilingual children's cross-linguistic transfer occurs in spontaneous production when there is structural overlap between the two languages and ambiguity in at least one language (Döpke, 1998; Hulk and Müller, 2000). This study tested whether overlap/ambiguity of adjective–noun strings in English and French predicted transfer. In English, there is only one order (adjective–noun) while in French both adjective–noun and noun–adjective order are allowed, with the latter as the default. Unidirectional transfer from English to French was predicted. 35 French–English preschool bilingual children (and 35 age-matched English monolinguals and 10 French monolinguals) were asked to name pictures by using an adjective–noun string. In addition to the reversing adjective–noun strings in French as predicted by the overlap/ambiguity hypothesis, the bilingual children reversed more adjective–noun strings in English than monolinguals. It is proposed that cross-linguistic transfer might better be understood as an epiphenomenon of speech production.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , March 2006 , pp. 15 - 32
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2006

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Footnotes

This study was funded through an operating grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Many thanks to the parents who allowed their children to participate and the daycares and preschools who welcomed us while we ran this study. Christie Ladouceur, Amy Ryniak and Nathalie Savoie helped with finding children and with the testing. Monique Charbonnier, Andrea Krott, Nathalie Savoie, Marie-Josée Verret and Robert Wilcocks all provided their intuitions about the grammaticality of adjective–noun strings in various languages. Gary Dell and Christina Gagne discussed with me exactly how a speech production model could account for the present data. Anamaria Popescu read and criticized an earlier version of this paper.