Crosslinguistic influence on the syntax-pragmatics interface. Connective use by Dutch-Russian bilingual children.

Abstract

The present study is a corpus study on the use of discourse connectives by Dutch-Russian bilingual children. Narratives told by monolingual and bilingual children were analyzed in order to verify the existence of crosslinguistic influence in structures that involve the syntax-pragmatic interface. The structures include the frequency distribution of Dutch and Russian additive and (semi)-adversative connectives across topic-shift and topic-maintenance contexts. The bilingual children were tested in both their languages and compared with age-matched bilinguals. The study aims to establish whether the interface hypothesis can account for crosslinguistic influence or whether language-external factors such as age, quality of the input, or language dominance can be posited as a predictor of crosslinguistic effects in the production of discourse connectives by young bilingual children. The results revealed that the Dutch structures were not vulnerable to influence from the Russian onto the Dutch language. The results demonstrated that dominance in the Dutch language influenced the Russian structures; hence, crosslinguistic influence occurred in the opposite direction than was predicted.