Central to this debate is whether such interactions are expressed as
instances of transfer, facilitation, or delay (Paradis & Genesee, 1996).
Transfer, in the syntactic domain, involves the ‘incorporation of a grammati-
cal property into one language from the other’ (Paradis & Genesee, 1996: 3),
reflecting a more qualitative expression of cross-linguistic influence which
can only occur in bilingual speech. Facilitation and delay refer to instances
of accelerated or (near-) absent development in comparison to monolingual
(or different sets of bilingual) controls (see also Fabiano-Smith & Goldstein,
2010), reflecting a more quantitative effect not necessarily unique to bilin-
guals (Müller et al., 2011).
Although many studies have identified instances of transfer, facilitation,
and delay, of relevance to this chapter are those instances of cross-linguistic
influence in relation to gender marking and word order. In relation to trans-
fer, English word order (in combination with the plausible (aux) SVO order
in Welsh) seems to influence simultaneous bilinguals’ interpretation of sen-
tential subjects in Welsh, as mentioned above (Gathercole et al., 2005). With
respect to German, several studies have shown that word order is highly
sensitive to transfer (Muller, 1998) or to a syntactic bootstrapping effect
(Gawlitzek-Maiwald & Tracy, 1996). Accordingly, children might use lin-
guistic knowledge they have already acquired in one language to boost their
knowledge of the other. In terms of facilitation and delay, Kupisch et al.
(2002) analysed gender in Italian and French monolingual as well as in
German-Italian- and German-French bilingual corpora for evidence of cross-
linguistic influence. Their study revealed that the bilinguals tended to pro-
duce more errors in gender assignment relative to monolingual age-matched
peers, especially in French (which is far more opaque than in Italian), sug-
gesting some kind of a delay in development when learning a transparent
system alongside an opaque system or when learning two gendered lan-
guages that have mismatching patterns. Similarly, Kupisch (2006) studied
simultaneous bilinguals acquiring French and German or Italian and
German, and found that the bilinguals mastered the determiner system in
German faster than their monolingual peers, irrespective of whether German
was acquired alongside a transparent (Italian) or a more opaque (French)
partner language. It may well be that structures that are typically learned
early in one language may ‘bolster’ the child’s development of similar struc-
tures in the other language, especially in cases where that structure is usually
learned late in the other language.
How is cross-linguistic infl uence expressed?
Although bilinguals often ‘mix’ their two languages, as already discussed,
an essential component of linguistic transfer has to do with the identifica-
tion of ‘systemic’ vs. ‘episodic’ incorporation of a foreign grammar. In order
to demonstrate true transfer, one must first demonstrate that the influence
50 Part 2: Bilingual Language Development