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Testing Hulk & Müller (2000) on crosslinguistic influence: Root Infinitives in a bilingual German/English child

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2003

SHARON UNSWORTH
SHARON UNSWORTH
Affiliation:
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics
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Abstract

This paper considers whether the findings on the referential properties of Root Infinitives in monolingual children (Wijnen, 1997; Hoekstra and Hyams, 1998) are replicated in a bilingual situation. Testing a proposal put forward by Hulk and Müller (2000), the present study investigates whether and how crosslinguistic influence manifests itself, using original longitudinal data from a bilingual German/English child. The bilingual results are found to be broadly consistent with the monolingual data: there is no indication of either quantitative or qualitative crosslinguistic influence. Consequently, it is argued that these data show that Hulk and Müller's proposal needs refining. Suggestions are made as to how this could be achieved.

Type
RESEARCH NOTE
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , August 2003 , pp. 143 - 158
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2003

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Footnotes

I would like to thank audiences at Utrecht and Durham universities, the Third International Symposium on Bilingualism (Bristol, UK; April, 2001) and GALA 2001 (Palmela, Portugal; September 2001), Peter Coopmans and Bonnie Schwartz for their comments on different versions of this paper. In addition, thanks are also due to the following people for their insightful comments, suggestions and discussion with regard to the present paper and/or the MA thesis on which it is based: three anonymous reviewers, Elma Blom, Olga Borik, Patrick Brandt, Aafke Hulk, Nina Hyams, Natascha Müller, and Frank Wijnen. Finally, I would like to express my sincerest thanks to lsquo;Annie’, undoubtedly now well beyond the RI stage, and her parents, for their cooperation and support whilst collecting the data reported on here.