as demonstrated in studies of German-English bilinguals (Tracy, 1995;
Döpke, 1998), than in typologically-distant pairings (e.g. French-German –
Meisel, 1990; Kupisch et al., 2002; or French-English – Paradis & Genesee,
1996).- Non-linguistic influences. Although most accounts seem to rely on lan-
guage-internal explanations to explain the occurrence of transfer, others
have attempted to expand the study of cross-linguistic influence to
include a measure of child-external influences (e.g. Paradis & Navarro,
2003). Gathercole (2007) further suggested that transfer may be linked
to language dominance, suggesting that transfer is most likely to occur
in those bilinguals who are ‘balanced’ in both languages. Her argument
is that the two languages of a balanced bilingual will have had more time
to ‘bump ... into each other’s territory’ (p. 240), and notes recent evi-
dence from Van Hell and Dijkstra (2002) and Gathercole et al. (2005)
(discussed above) as supporting this view.
It is clear, therefore, that there are many factors that influence whether
or not one language is likely to be influenced by another in any one bilingual
(see also Chapters 1 and 4, and Chapters 9 and 10 for neurolinguistic evi-
dence). The remainder of the chapter will present a flavour of the data from
our German-Welsh dataset, highlighting potential instances of cross-linguis-
tic influence that were observed.
Two Welsh-German Case Studies
Participants
We collected data from two children who were acquiring German and
Welsh simultaneously as bilingual L1s. Child Participant 1 (CP1), a boy, was
2;4 (year;month) when the study began, and Child Participant 2, a girl, was
2;6 (year;month) at the start of the study. In the case of CP1, the mother was
a native German speaker from Leipzig and addressed the child in a non-
standard German dialect (Upper Saxon). The infant’s father became a fluent
Welsh-speaker at university and always addressed the infant in Welsh.
Although the transmission pattern was almost invariably ‘one parent, one
language’ (cf. Romaine, 1995; Döpke, 1992), the mother learned Welsh as an
adult, to a native-like standard, and the father had also learned German.
However, both parents chose to converse with each other in Welsh. This
meant that the child often heard the mother speaking Welsh in addition to
German, and was aware that the father could understand German. However,
the speech transmitted from the mother to the child was almost exclusively
German, and the speech addressed by the father to the child was also nearly
always Welsh.
52 Part 2: Bilingual Language Development