Cross-linguistic influences in the frog-story narrations of six-year-old children acquiring Finnish and English
Keywords:
bilingual children, cross-linguistic interaction, linguistic choice, narrative language, systemic-functional linguistic theoryAbstract
This study describes some of the linguistic features used by 11 six-year-old bilingual children in a narrative task. All the children spoke Finnish as their first language and had begun to acquire English at the latest at the age of four. The objective of the study was to discover whether and how the English language possibly influenced the children’s linguistic choices when telling a story in Finnish. This was performed by observing the atypical expressions the bilingual children produced in their narratives and further by comparing these expressions to the language usage of monolingual six-year old peers (n = 10) and monolingual five-year-olds (n = 12) in the same task. Nearly all bilingual children produced atypical expressions which represented mainly either 1) cross-linguistic interaction or 2) inaccuracies that cannot be traced to the influence of English but are here rather considered to be connected to Finnish language acquisition. Overall, the bilingual children produced atypical expressions slightly more often than the monolingual children. Based on the findings of cross-linguistic interaction the bilingual children used some expressions that were unique compared to the monolingual children’s expressions. However, some of the bilingual children’s choices, which were connected to Finnish language acquisition, were very similar to those of the five-year-old monolingual children. In relation to the clinical work of speech-language pathologists and future research, this study suggests that context and practises in collecting the data may influence the susceptibility of cross-linguistic features in narrative discourse.
