Recent studies have shown that crosslinguistic effects do not appear always and in all grammatical domains in bilingual first language acquisition, and thus, researchers need to determine the locus, the sources and the directionality of crosslinguistic influence. /p>
Some researchers have claimed that dominance determines crosslinguistic influence and thus, its direction is predicted to be from the dominant to the weaker language (Paradis and Genesee, 1996). Other researchers have shown that language dominance could not explain the crosslinguistic effects found in their data, since the target of crosslinguistic influence was the weaker language and not the dominant one, and therefore, their claim is that crosslinguistic influence is likely to occur when: a) the relevant grammatical domain involves the syntax/pragmatics interface; b) there is an overlap between the two languages regarding this domain (Müller and Hulk, 2000).
Although several other studies have verified this hypothesis about transfer there are limitations. Therefore, I will discuss the limitations of current studies that support the susceptibility of the syntax/pragmatics interface to crosslinguistic influence in BFLA and I will discuss ways in which this claim can be tested more systematically.