Cross-Linguistic Influence in Cantonese-English Bilingual Children: The Case of Right-Dislocation in English

Abstract

This corpus-based study investigates whether cross-linguistic influence occurs in the domain of English right-dislocation (RD) in 6 Cantonese-English bilingual children (Yip & Matthews, 2007). RD constructions in Cantonese and English meet the two conditions for cross-linguistic influence proposed by Hulk and Müller (2000): (1) RD is a phenomenon at the interface of syntax and pragmatics, used for topic marking and focusing (Yip, 2013), and (2) RDs in the target languages show partial structural overlap at the surface level. The results show that there is evidence of cross-linguistic influence in this domain. Quantitatively, Cantonese-dominant bilingual children produced a significantly higher percentage of RD than English monolingual children. Qualitatively, some RD structures produced by bilingual children as in (1) cannot be found in monolingual children. 1. So green, this one. (Alicia 2;10;15) We argue that some aspects of the results cannot be adequately accounted for without looking at language dominance and properties of parental input. While Notley et al. (2007) claim that there is no overlap in RDs in their study due to the absence of English RD in their sample of input addressed to the child, our data show that RD is indeed present in the input, and even low input frequency of RDs can create overlap in the dual input. The findings have implications for structural overlap as a factor in cross-linguistic influence.