‘equivalent’ structure in another. Again, further analysis are planned to help
identify the role of dominance, frequency, and exposure in bilinguals’ co-
and/or independent development of these structures beyond age 3.
Finally, the data presented here also highlighted some instances of struc-
tural overlap in children’s word order patterns that may reveal instances of
transfer, whereas others may not reflect cross-linguistic influence per se.
However, since both languages allow some element of variation, it may take
the children a little longer to pin-point exactly which patterns are permissi-
ble in one language or another. This period of exploration may result in
delayed performance, at the early ages, which, provided the optimal level of
input required to acquire both languages persists, should level out reflecting
native-like standards with time.
Planned further analysis of the complete data set will continue to iden-
tify children’s productions of overlapping systems, contributing a new data
set to CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) and furthering our knowledge not
only of children’s parallel acquisition of specific structures in the two lan-
guages, but also of bilingual acquisition in general.
The next chapter reviews recent data on bilinguals’ command of mor-
phology and their organisation of semantic concepts, and proposes a fresh
new model of bilingual acquisition that can explain the observed relation-
ships between a bilingual’s two languages.
Note
(1) In generative grammar, syntactic structure is subdivided into three domains, which
are represented by the functional categories DP (Determiner Phrase), IP (Inflectional
Phrase), and CP (Complementizer Phrase). The latter is considered the highest projec-
tion of a clause. Within the domain of C, several discourse-related features (such as
topic or focus) are implemented (cf. Chomsky, 1981; Rizzi, 1997).
62 Part 2: Bilingual Language Development