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Is language interference (when it occurs) a graded or an all-or-none effect? Evidence from bilingual reported speech production

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2018

ANNA HATZIDAKI ,
MIKEL SANTESTEBAN  and
WOUTER DUYCK
ANNA HATZIDAKI*
Affiliation:
Department of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
MIKEL SANTESTEBAN
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).
WOUTER DUYCK
Affiliation:
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University.
*
Address for correspondence: Anna Hatzidaki, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of English Language and Literature, 157 84 Athensahatzidaki@gmail.com
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Abstract

Do cross-lingual interactions occur even with structures of different word order in different languages of bilinguals? Or could the latter provide immunity to interference of the contrasting characteristics of the other language? To answer this question, we examined the reported speech production (utterances reporting what just happened; e.g., Holly asked what Eric ate) of two groups of proficient, unbalanced bilinguals with varying similarity between their native (L1-Spanish/L1-Dutch) and second language (L2-English). The results showed that both groups of bilinguals produced word order errors when formulating indirect What-questions in L2, regardless of how similar the L1 was to the L2 in that respect. Our findings suggest that in the case of reported speech production in the examined bilingual groups, cross-linguistic syntactic differences by themselves suffice to induce language interference, and that the degree of similarity between the L1 and the L2 does not seem to modulate the magnitude of this effect.

Keywords

cross-linguistic syntactic differenceslanguage interferencesentence productionbilingualism
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , May 2018 , pp. 489 - 504
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*This research was supported by a Special Research Fund for Visiting Foreign Researchers awarded by the Research Council of Ghent University, the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration (Grant No. 613465), the Basque Government (IT665-13), and the Spanish Government (MINECO: FFI2014-55733-P, RyC-2013-14722). The authors would also like to thank Maria Juncal Gutierrez Mangado for her input.

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