Bilinguals’ sensitivity to specificity and genericity: evidence from implicit and explicit knowledge

Abstract

The present paper investigates whether school-aged French-English bilingual children’s implicit and explicit knowledge of article use is affected by cross-linguistic influence (CLI) during online and offline sentence comprehension. The studies focus on the encoding of plural and mass nouns in specific and generic contexts. We also explore whether individual measures of oral proficiency, language exposure and age play a role in the children’s performance. Forty-three 8-to-10-year-old French-English bilingual children took part in a Self-Paced Reading task, a Grammaticality Judgement task and a Cloze test in their two languages. Overall, CLI was observed across tasks in English and French. These findings suggest that CLI can be bi-directional and tap into school-aged bilinguals’ implicit and explicit representations during sentence comprehension and production. The data also makes a new contribution to our understanding of the relative amount of language exposure, oral proficiency and age on CLI.