Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual productions of the English past tense in Arabic heritage speakers of Australian English

This paper examines cross-linguistic influence in morphology among adult monolingual and heritage speakers (Arabic-English and Chinese-English). Participants performed a task requiring them to form past tenses for English nonce words. Arabic-English bilinguals produced significantly more vowel change past tenses than either English monolinguals or Chinese-English bilinguals.We attribute the preponderance of vowel change past tenses to cross-linguistic influence of Arabic, as vowel change is a dominant morphological property in Arabic but not in English or Chinese. These results support dynamic models of bilingualism with constantly active and interacting languages and contribute to the phenomenology of crosslinguistic interference.