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Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual acquisition: subject omission in learners of Inuktitut and English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2005

ELIZABETH E. ZWANZIGER ,
SHANLEY E. M. ALLEN  and
FRED GENESEE
ELIZABETH E. ZWANZIGER
Affiliation:
Boston University
SHANLEY E. M. ALLEN
Affiliation:
Boston University
FRED GENESEE
Affiliation:
McGill University
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Abstract

This study investigates subject omission in six English-Inuktitut simultaneous bilingual children, aged 1;8–3;9, to examine whether there are cross-language influences in their language development. Previous research with other language pairs has shown that the morphosyntax of one language can influence the development of morphosyntax in the other language. Most of this research has focused on Romance-Germanic language combinations using case studies. In this study, we examined a language pair (English-Inuktitut) with radically different morphosyntactic structures. Analysis of the English-only and Inuktitut-only utterances of the children revealed monolingual-like acquisition patterns and subject omission rates. The data indicate that these bilingual children possessed knowledge of the target languages that was language-specific and that previously identified triggers for crosslinguistic influence do not operate universally.

Type
Note
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , November 2005 , pp. 893 - 909
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This study was sponsored by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Fred Genesee, Martha Crago, and Shanley Allen.