Crosslinguistic Influence in Spanish-English Simultaneous Bilingual Children

Abstract

This study investigates whether the learner-English of Spanish-English balanced bilingual 2nd and 5th graders is subject to crosslinguistic influence. It does so by analysing speech data from 30 bilingual children and comparing their utterances to 30 monolingual children from the same corpus. The results of the corpus study reveal that Spanish-English balanced bilinguals are not susceptible to crosslinguistic influence after the age of seven. During the analysis of the data, it was also found that Spanish-English bilingual 5th graders (ages 10–11) are prone to produce complicated linguistic structures, such as relative clauses and adjective-noun strings, more frequently than their monolingual peers. The findings in this study show that the two language systems in these bilinguals do not function interdependently, and thus support the view of the Autonomous Development Hypothesis. However, it does not exclude the possibility of the existence of interdependent development in earlier phases or when language dominance is present.