Is Referent Reintroduction More Vulnerable to Crosslinguistic Influence? An Analysis of Referential Choice among Japanese–English Bilingual Children

Abstract

This study aims to examine whether a crosslinguistic influence (CLI) is exerted on the referring expressions of the spoken narratives of Japanese–English bilingual children in different discourse contexts. Thirteen early bilingual (school-age) children separately presented Japanese and English narratives for a wordless picture book and a speechless video clip. Further, seven Japanese and nine English monolingual children participated as controls. The linguistic devices that the children adopted to introduce, reintroduce, and maintain the topic were compared with those of their monolingual controls to detect any CLI. As predicted, CLI for English on Japanese was observed but not vice versa. In Japanese, bilinguals utilize significantly more noun phrases (NPs) compared with their monolingual counterparts. More crucially, this was observed only in the referent reintroduction context, indicating that only discourse contexts that require the integration of much pragmatic information may be vulnerable to English influence. Null forms are barely utilized in English narratives; thus, no influence from Japanese was observed. We present the referential choice patterns in the elicited spoken narratives of bilingual school-age children acquiring an under-researched language pair. By controlling for the discourse context, we demonstrate that CLI is more likely to manifest in the reintroduction context. These findings offer additional evidence for the interface and structural overlap hypothesis, further highlighting the criticality of considering information structure as an influencing condition.