Exploring the notion of cross-linguistic transfer across German and
Welsh is a central goal of the study discussed in this chapter. For that reason,
the following section provides an outline of what is known about cross-
linguistic influence among early simultaneous bilinguals, followed by a dis-
cussion of the preliminary patterns emerging from the German-Welsh
datasets, both for gender and word order.
Cross-linguistic Infl uence in Simultaneous
Bilinguals
Early research investigating the nature of bilinguals’ early linguistic
representations tended to support the notion of a unified system from the
outset (i.e. the Unitary Systems Hypothesis – for example Grosjean, 1982;
Redlinger & Park, 1980; Vihman, 1985; Volterra & Taeschner, 1978). Their
evidence came largely from naturalistic speech corpora that demonstrated
many instances of ‘unsystematic’ language mixing, especially at the earlier
ages, which was then followed by a stage of differentiation as the child’s
linguistic and socio-linguistic knowledge matured around age 3. Such
observations were taken as evidence for the existence of a single language
system containing words (separated in the second stage) and linguistic
rules (separated in the third stage) from both languages. More recently,
however, researchers have questioned the validity of these findings, and
propose, in contrast, that bilinguals differentiate their two systems, right
from the very beginning (e.g. De Houwer, 1990; Döpke, 2000; Genesee,
1989; Hulk & Müller, 2000; Meisel, 1989; Paradis & Genesee, 1996). For
example, studies on bilingual development have shown that both languages
are acquired independently, following language-specific rules (cf. Meisel,
1989; De Houwer, 1990).
Furthermore, if a monolingual setting is provided, children have been
shown to be perfectly capable of differentiating their languages in interaction
(cf. Genesee, 1989; Montanari, 2009a, 2009b).
This is not to say that the two languages will not come into contact with
one another at some point and in some way. More recent studies hypothesise
that, despite the independence of their development, both languages may
influence each other, not necessarily as whole systems, but in specific lin-
guistic areas (Müller & Hulk, 2000). However, the extent to which the dual-
autonomy of these systems ‘invites’ cross-linguistic interaction, or where
exactly such interaction may or will take place – in what form, and under
what circumstances – remains unanswered (Müller & Hulk, 2000; Müller
et al., 2002; see also Chapters 1 and 4). The data presented in this chapter
contribute to the debate by allowing for an investigation of a typologically
distant language pair (one Germanic, one Celtic) not previously explored in
the bilingual literature.
Cross-linguistic Influence and Patterns of Acquisition 49