413 Cross-linguistic Infl uence
and Patterns of Acquisition
Enlli Môn Thomas, Katja F. Cantone,
Susanne Davies and Anna Shadrova
Introduction
One of the key areas of interest in relation to bilingualism research has
to do with understanding the nature of the bilingual mind. What is the rela-
tionship between a bilingual’s two languages? Are speakers’ two languages
stored together or are they separated in the mind? If stored together, how
does one separate the two for the purpose of meaningful communication? If
stored independently, how and why do bilinguals code-switch? Are cross-
linguistic influences uni- or bidirectional? And are there different storage
and/or processing patterns across different types of bilinguals? These, and
many more questions, have formed the basis of fruitful investigations in the
field for decades, and form the basis of the chapters in this volume. Of par-
ticular interest to our group is the question of where and under what circum-
stances we find cross-linguistic influence in various kinds of bilingual
speakers, with a particular emphasis on psycholinguistic studies of cross-
linguistic influence in the morphosyntactic domain.
This chapter will explore further the notion of cross-linguistic influence,
as already outlined in Chapters 1 and 2, by presenting some preliminary
data from a recent naturalistic study of two simultaneous bilingual children
acquiring an unexplored language pair, namely German and Welsh. As the
focus of the analysis will be on the children’s early acquisition of gender and
word order in both languages, we will first describe the gender systems in
both languages, followed by a discussion of what is known about children’s
acquisition of gender in those languages. Issues relevant to word order will
then be discussed, including a description of the word order structures in
German and in Welsh and what is known about children’s acquisition of
those structures. This is then followed by a discussion of the factors that are
relevant to cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous bilinguals, focusing on