Accelerated acquisition in English-Spanish bilinguals: The Structural Transfer Hypothesis

While bilingual children are said to differentiate their two languages as early as the babbling stage, this does not mean that the languages cannot influence one another. In fact, cross-linguistic interference is commonly found in bilingual first-language acquisition. In much of the literature on cross-linguistic interference, a child acquires the target uses of a given syntactic construction in one language later than a monolingual child would (e.g. object drop [1]). Sometimes bilingual children systematically produce types of utterances that monolinguals rarely, if ever, produce [2]—such utterances tend to display some characteristic inherent to one of the child’s languages in the child’s other language. These atypical patterns of language development are taken to be the result of the simultaneous acquisition of two distinct grammars [3].