Abstract/Summary

This paper presents the results of two sentence production studies addressing the role of syntactic priming and of language exposure on the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in bilingual 5-year-olds. We investigated whether French-English bilingual children could be primed to use a topic (i.e. left-dislocation) and whether their performance differed substantially to that of French and English monolinguals. We also examined whether input quantity plays a role on the degree of accessibility of this syntactic construction in the bilinguals’ mind. While the results indicate a significant effect of elicitation condition only in French, they display a positive correlation between input quantity and the likelihood to produce a left-dislocation in both French and English. These findings make a strong case for the role of language exposure as a predictor of CLI. The data also support the recent proposal that CLI is the result of the daily processing of two languages.