Syntactic Transfer in a Cantonese-English Bilingual Child.

By Virginia Yip, S. Matthews. 2000

265 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Research on early bilingual development has suggested that syntactic transfer in bilingual acquisition is dependent on patterns of dominance and properties of the dual input the child is exposed to. In a case study of a Hong Kong bilingual child we present evidence of transfer from Cantonese to English in three areas where the two languages contrast typologically: wh-in-situ interrogatives, null objects and prenominal relatives are observed at a period when Cantonese is dominant as measured by MLUw. Comparisons with monolingual development show both qualitative and quantitative differences attributable to transfer. Language dominance is seen as the major determinant of transfer, with input ambiguity playing a role in the domain of null objects. While two distinct and separate linguistic systems are simultaneously developing in the bilingual mind, the pervasiveness of transfer implies a high degree of interaction between them. The findings show that the bilingual subject in our case study has taken a different path from monolinguals toward the target. This paper reports findings on the syntactic development of a Cantonese‐English bilingual child in Hong Kong, demonstrating a wide range of transfer effects from Cantonese to English. The specific ways in which Cantonese influence manifests itself in the development of English in the bilingual subject in different areas of grammar argue for a high degree of interaction between the two grammars. In one of the first systematic studies of syntactic acquisition of bilingual children involving this language pair, our analysis shows both qualitative and quantitative differences between bilingual and monolingual development. The pervasiveness of transfer effects is evident in three areas of grammar which involve core contrasts between Cantonese and English: wh-in-situ interrogatives, null objects and prenominal relatives are documented in the subject’s English. These structures are either not found or are substantially less frequent in monolingual data. The findings are discussed in terms of language dominance as well as the possibility of input ambiguity. The bilingual data presented in this paper contribute empirically to the expanding database on bilingual acquisition, and theoretically to the study of cross-linguistic influence and interaction of linguistic systems in bilinguals. Cross-linguistic influence and syntactic transfer in bilingual development

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aeb70d0e6a2cd70c8da420b08c6665d9d79f3030

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Citations in the corpus

Effects of input on the early grammatical development of bilingual children (2010, background): “It has been found that cross-linguistic influence occurs more clearly from the dominant to the weak language, than the other way around (Döpke, 1998; Yip & Matthews, 2000).”
Bilingual children's sensitivity to specificity and genericity: Evidence from metalinguistic awareness* (2009, background): “…of the target languages, variables such as language dominance as measured by children’s Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), amount of talk, and vocabulary composition have also been investigated as possible contributing factors to cross-linguistic influence (Yip and Matthews, 2000; Kupisch, 2007).”
Bilingual first language acquisition: exploring the limits of the language faculty (2001, unknown): “In contrast, cross-language influences have been noted by Döpke (2000) in German-English bilingual children, by Hulk and van der Linden (1996) and Müller (1998) in German-French children, and by Yip and Matthews (2000) in a Chinese-English child.”
Cross-linguistic transfer in adjective–noun strings by preschool bilingual children (2006, background): “The fact that cross-linguistic transfer can be observed even when there is only one option in each language (e.g. Yip and Matthews, 2000; Nicoladis, 2002a; the English results in this study) suggests that there is competition between two languages’ syntactic rules at the lemma level.”
Crosslinguistic influence and language dominance in older bilingual children (2007, background): “…recent studies in child bilingualism have reported the existence of crosslinguistic influence from one language to another, but subject to restrictions of directionality and/or grammatical domain (e.g. Döpke, 1998; Müller, 1998; Yip and Matthews, 2000; Müller and Hulk, 2001, among others).”
The Language and Literacy Development of Young Dual Language Learners: A Critical Review (2014, background): “Other studies examined whether cross-linguistic influences may be specific to the language structure examined or influenced by the dominant language (Kupisch, 2007; Paradis, 2001; Yip & Matthews, 2000; Zwanziger, Allen, & Genesee, 2005).”
RELATIVE CLAUSES IN CANTONESE-ENGLISH BILINGUAL CHILDREN: Typological Challenges and Processing Motivations (2007, background): “…pattern of dominance, the children’s English shows transfer from Cantonese in several domains, including wh-insitu and null objects as well as RCs ~Yip & Matthews, 2000!+ Influence in the other direction, from English to the children’s Cantonese, is difficult to detect at all and appears only in…”