Re-examining cross-linguistic influence in the bilingual acquisition of wh-questions

![CDATA[Many recent studies suggest that bilingual children differentiate between their two languages early on (Genesee, 1989; Meisel, 1989; De Houwer, 1990; Genesee, Nicoladis & Paradis, 1995; cited by Yip & Matthews, 2000). A question of interest however concerns the degree of interaction between a bilingual’s two languages, and the cross-linguistic influence that can arise (Müller, 1998). This paper examines the bilingual acquisition of wh-questions by children who are acquiring English and Cantonese Chinese simultaneously. The data from the seven bilingual children whose data we consider in this paper belong to the Yip-Matthews set of corpora, available on CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000). In their own analysis of the corpora, Yip and Matthews conclude that the cross-linguistic influence they find is due to language dominance. In this paper, I propose to enrich this explanation by looking more closely at the syntactic features that are involved in the wh-question types of the two languages being acquired. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents two proposals from the bilingualism literature on cross-linguistic influence, comparing and contrasting the two proposals in the context of the bilingual production of whquestions. Section 3 presents Yip and Matthews’ main findings, and offers some new insights based on a re-examination of their bilingual corpora (as well as some additional monolingual data). In Section 4, I suggest an enrichment of the two proposals discussed in Section 2, proposing a way of reconciling languageexternal and language-internal accounts of cross-linguistic influence. More specifically, I reanalyze the main findings under the proposed model. Section 5 summarizes and concludes the discussion.]]