The role of crosslinguistic influence in Greek child and adult
learners’ acquisition of English as a Foreign Language
Keywords: immersion education
sequential bilingualism
Greek
second language acquisition
crosslinguistic transfer

Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) is the influence that a bilingual's first language (L1) exerts on their second language (L2) and vice versa. Most research on the causes and effects of the phenomenon focuses on simultaneous bilingual children and syntax-pragmatics interface linguistic structures that are deemed susceptible to CLI. As such, it does not determine whether the phenomenon affects the development of L2 learners and/or the use of linguistic structures that are not susceptible to CLI. To this end, this doctoral project aimed to uncover the role of CLI in Greek children and adults’ use of CLI-prone and not CLI-prone structures in English.
In Experiment 1, 140 Greek-English sequential bilingual preschool children (35 attending a total immersion programme programme and 35 attending a partial immersion programme, as well as 34 Greek monolingual and 36 English monolingual controls) were tested on their use of sentential subjects (a syntax-discourse interface structure that is susceptible to CLI), once in Greek and once in English. The bilingual children were found to omit sentential subjects in English more often than their English monolingual peers. This finding could be attributed to CLI from the children’s dominant L1 to their non-dominant L2.
Experiment 2 was conducted parallel to Experiment 1, and aimed to ascertain if the subject omissions observed in Experiment 1 were indeed due to CLI. The same children were tested on their use of the subordinate clause marker ‘to’ (a syntactic structure that is not susceptible to CLI and, thus, could serve as a control) in the two languages. The analyses revealed that bilingual children omitted more clause markers in English than their English monolingual peers. This finding hints that bilingual children are attentive to the (cross-linguistic) distributional properties of the structures they are exposed to.
Hence, Experiment 3 was designed to investigate whether the subject omissions observed in Experiment 1 also appeared at a more advanced state of L2 acquisition. To this end, a group of 31 Greek adult L2 learners were tested on their use of referential expressions, and their performance was compared to that of 30 English L1 speakers. Like their child counterparts, the adult L2 learners were also found to omit more sentential subjects from their utterances than the L1 controls – an effect attributed to CLI from the learners’ L1, Greek, to their L2, English.
Considered together, the results of these three experiments highlight that sequential bilingual children pattern with adult L2 learners in terms of their production (and CLI patterns therein). Moreover, they do not support traditional accounts of CLI which predict the phenomenon to arise in the case of structural overlap and/or just for interface linguistic structures. To provide a uniform account of omissions in L2 acquisition, the effects observed across the three experiments could be explained under a usage-based account that considers the structures’ distribution in the L1 (and L2) input as well as the attentional mechanisms that sequential bilingual and L2 learners have developed through their exposure to the L1.