This ongoing study investigates whether crosslinguistic influence occurs from English to Greek in a bilingual acquisition context. In particular, I test the proposal that in order for crosslinguistic influence to occur two conditions must be met: a) the relevant grammatical domain should involve the syntax/pragmatics interface; b) there should be an overlap at the surface level between the two languages regarding this domain.
The study considers experimental data from 14 Greek/English bilingual children (mean age:8years) living in Athens and monolingual control groups regarding phenomena that involve the syntax/pragmatics interface and narrow syntax. In particular, I investigated:
a) The distribution of null/overt and pre-/postverbal subjects, which involve the syntax/pragmatics interface in Greek and thus, are a domain where crosslinguistic influence is likely to occur in bilingual acquisition (Müller & Hulk, 2001).
b) The use of embedded questions and object pronouns, which in contrast are relevant to narrow syntax. Therefore, crosslinguistic influence is not expected to occur in this domain.
Elicited production and Preference judgement tasks were used for testing all the domains. Greek and English monolingual children and adults were also tested. The findings indicate that:
a) The bilingual data are consistent with the monolingual data in English in all domains as expected.
b) Crosslinguistic influence is not found in the domain of the syntactic phenomena in Greek as predicted.
c) The syntax/pragmatics interface phenomena in Greek were not found to be as vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence from English as predicted.