Bilingualism research group

Speakers: Sharon Unsworth & Chantal van Dijk (Radboud University, Nijmegen)

Title: Predicting cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children

Abstract: It is well known that bilingual children's two languages may influence each other (see e.g., Serratrice, 2013, Unsworth, 2013 for reviews). Over the past 25 years, such cross-linguistic influence has been the subject of considerable research, and yet we still don't really have a good understanding of what predicts when and how cross-linguistic influence occurs. The idea that cross-linguistic influence in part results from language co-activation has been suggested in various places in the literature (e.g., Hulk, 2000; Meisel, 2007, Pérez-Leroux et al., 2011) but it is only recently that it has started to gain traction in research on bilingual language development (e.g., Hervé et al., 2016; Hsin et al., 2013). More specifically, Serratriceand colleagues have suggested that, similar to bilingual adults, bilingual children also share syntactic representations and that cross-linguistic influence may be seen as cross-language priming (Serratrice, 2014, 2016; Serratrice et al., 2012; Vasilyeva et al., 2010). In this paper, we present a series of studies (meta-analysis, self-paced listening, structural priming) providing evidence consistent with this proposal.