The use of Japanese particles by a bilingual child : is it Influenced by English?

By investigating the influence of a Japanese-English bilingual child's stronger language (English) over the production of her weaker language (Japanese), this study attempts to examine whether there is any evidence of English influence in the acquisition of Japanese particles. Previous studies suggest that bilingual children tend to follow the path of monolingual language acquisition, although there is some opposition to this theory. In the case of the child in this study, interference from English seems to be limited to the lexical level, as the syntactic features (including particles) seem to be governed by the Japanese rules. From an investigation of the child's use of particles, the data suggest that there is no strong evidence that her acquisition pattern has been influenced by English, even though English is her stronger language. It was, however, noted that this child was not following the exact acquisition patterns of monolingual children, either.