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Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous Cantonese–English bilingual children's comprehension of relative clauses*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2014

EVAN KIDD ,
ANGEL CHAN  and
JOIE CHIU
EVAN KIDD*
Affiliation:
The Australian National University ARC, Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
ANGEL CHAN
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
JOIE CHIU
Affiliation:
The Australian National University
*
Address for correspondence: Evan Kidd, Research School of Psychology (Building 39), Australian National University, Canberra 0200 ACT, AUSTRALIA[email protected]
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Abstract

The current study investigated the role of cross-linguistic influence in Cantonese–English bilingual children's comprehension of subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (RCs). Twenty simultaneous Cantonese–English bilingual children (Mage = 8;11, SD = 2;6) and 20 vocabulary-matched Cantonese monolingual children (Mage = 6;4, SD = 1;3) completed a test of Cantonese RC comprehension. The bilingual children also completed a test of English RC comprehension. The results showed that, whereas the monolingual children were equally competent on subject and object RCs, the bilingual children performed significantly better on subject RCs. Error analyses suggested that the bilingual children were most often correctly assigning thematic roles in object RCs, but were incorrectly choosing the RC subject as the head referent. This pervasive error was interpreted to be due to the fact that both Cantonese and English have canonical SVO word order, which creates competition with structures that compete with an object RC analysis.

Keywords

Cantonese–English bilingualsrelative clausescross-linguistic influence
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 438 - 452
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Pastor Ricky Mak and Ms Wendy Wu for help with recruiting, all the families who took part in the study, and Ludovica Serratrice, Natasha Tokowicz, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

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