Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children: from syntax to prosody

Abstract

Studies of grammatical development have shown how Cantonese and English interact in bilingual children (Yip & Matthews 2007; Ge et al. 2017). This line of work argues that surface overlap is a prerequisite for cross-linguistic influence to occur (Hulk & Müller 2000), and that language dominance plays a major role in determining whether such influence will occur and to what extent. Whether these principles extend to phonological development is less well understood. Here we consider the case of prosody in Cantonese-English bilingual children. Mok & Lee (2018) show that comparable cross-linguistic influence arises in the development of prosody. Some bilingual children apply prosodic templates from English to Cantonese, treating Cantonese bisyllabic words as trochaic with a high-low pattern overriding the lexical tones, e.g. pronouncing bi4bi1 ‘baby’ (low falling-high level) as bi1bi4 (high level-low falling). The high-low pattern corresponding to stressed and unstressed syllables in English is characteristic of English-dominant children, and also attested in L2 learners of Cantonese (Mak & Matthews 2011). We interpret these instances of cross-linguistic influence along similar lines to syntactic influence. A stressed syllable in English overlaps phonetically with a high tone syllable in Cantonese, implicating structural overlap. The occurrence of prosodic templates is not attested in monolingual or Cantonese-dominant children, consistent with the role of dominance as observed in the grammatical domain.