The effect of language dominance on crosslinguistic influence: The acquisition of reference assignment of Dutch subject pronouns by Dutch-English bilingual children

Abstract

This project set out to study the acquisition of reference assignment of Dutch subject pronouns by Dutch-English bilingual children between the ages of four and twelve. This study examined the reference assignment preference for the p-pronoun and d-pronoun of fifty-one Dutch-English bilingual children with the use of the Coloring Book Method (Pinto & Zuckerman, 2017a), which uses colouring pages and pre-recorded sentences to extract the child’s comprehension of the Dutch discourse-tracking rules for the subject pronouns. The aim was to investigate the role of language dominance on a phenomenon thought to be sensitive to crosslinguistic influence. Language dominance as a construct as well as its effects are much debated and this study was aimed at gaining more insight into this area of research. Language dominance was determined based on the experience-based measure of calculated amount of exposure to both languages gathered through a parental questionnaire. The results revealed that although an effect of bilingualism and age are present during the acquisition of reference assignment of Dutch subject pronouns by Dutch-English bilinguals, an effect of language dominance was not convincingly supported by the data.