This study looks at the acquisition of caused motion expressions by Uyghur-Chinese early successive bilinguals. Two specific issues it aims to address are 1) the relative role of universal cognitive factors versus language-specific properties in children’s language development and whether and to what extent is the acquisition process modulated by cross-linguistic influence.
An important question in language acquisition in childhood is the relative impact of universal cognitive determinants versus language-specific factors and a fruitful venue for examining this question has been the domain of spatial language. However, available studies primary focused on L1 and 2L1 scenarios (e.g., Allen et al., 2007; Hickmann et al., 2018) while the context of early successive bilingualism has not received sufficient attention, despite its relevance for our understanding of the nature of child bilingualism and indeed language acquisition more generally (cf. Meisel, 2018). The present study fills the gap in the literature by investigating how Uyghur-Chinese early successive bilinguals acquisition caused motion expressions. Four groups of Uyghur-Chinese bilingual children (AO»3; aged 4;6, 6;5, 8;4 and 10;6) were invited to narrate short cartoons depicting caused motion situations. Our findings show the simultaneous but differential impact of both language-specific properties and universal cognitive factors in ESB acquisition of motion expressions. The observed differences in the developmental trajectories of the two languages, especially as evidenced by children’s consistently higher utterance density in Chinese, points to the weightier role of language-specific constraints. However, the increase in utterance density, i.e. children’s ability to focus on and retain more semantic components for expression over time regardless of language indicates the contribution of their developing general cognitive abilities. Bilinguals follow the adult pattern of expressing caused motion in their L1. In their L2 Chinese, they bypass the shared constructions in their two languages up until age 8 and opt for the structure that is specific to their L1, presumably because this option is syntactically less complex (mono-clausal) compared to the shared bi-clausal option. As such, cross-linguistic influence seems to be shaped by structural/typological overlap on the one hand and the complexity of the structures involved on the other.
