Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
936265 | Lingua | 2010 | 13 Pages |
Many researchers have observed that in the development of two grammatical systems the two languages can influence each other. This influence has been labeled cross-linguistic influence. It has been argued by some researchers that cross-linguistic influence is a child-internal process reflecting that bilingual children, when confronted with a highly complex grammatical phenomenon in one language, will use the less complex analysis of the same grammatical phenomenon in the respective other language for both languages temporarily. However, cross-linguistic influence may also be promoted or even caused by a so-called “parental contact-variety input”, meaning that child data would simply reflect a so-called “contact-variety input” of the native language of that parent who, for a long time, has lived in an L2 majority environment and thus shows some inherent cross-linguistic interference himself. The aim of the present research is to argue that a contact-variety approach cannot account for cross-linguistic influence in early bilingualism. The effects of cross-linguistic influence depend on language complexity and on the bilingual's fluency.