Cross-linguistic Influences in Bilingual First Language Acquisition

Examination Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Cologne, language: English, abstract: There is interdependent development in BFLA. Several studies could show that the systems are influencing each other and they can not be regarded as minor to argue for an autonomous development. Furthermore, there are different methods of predicting which grammatical domains will be influenced and the direction of influence. These are language internal factors, dominance or epiphenomena of speech production. Nevertheless, there are problems as some children did not show the predicted influence. Possible suggestion to the problem is a modification of the criteria already developed and an inclusion of the possibility of individual differences due to different learner types.