Testing for Crosslinguistic Influence and Exposure Effects in the Bilingual Acquisition of Specific Indefinite Objects

Publication Summary

Various factors have been shown to play a role in bilingual language acquisition. These include child-internal factors, such as chronological age, general cognitive abilities, age of onset, knowledge of another language and language aptitude, as well as child-external factors, such as SES, maternal education, amount and type of exposure (see Unsworth, Hulk, & Marinis, 2011 for overview). The present study focuses on two of these: amount of exposure and knowledge of another language. It investigates whether knowledge of another language leads to crosslinguistic influence at the syntax-semantics interface and whether amount of exposure modulates the extent of any such influence.