Justyna Leśniewska

This study aims to assess the extent of crosslinguistic influence in English as the weaker language of unbalanced bilingual children, and to compare the extent of such influence to that reported in the second language acquisition (SLA) literature. Additionally, by comparing children from different L1 backgrounds, we aim to see if typological distance impacts crosslinguistic influence. We collected elicited speech samples from 16 Polish-English and 44 French-English children who have had dual language input from birth, but whose English is weaker mostly because it is absent outside the home environment. The crosslinguistic error rates (an average of 6%) are lower for our participants than averages found in SLA literature, but still considerably high. Although French- and Polish-dominant children present comparable error profiles, the extent of crosslinguistic influence tends to be greater in the case of French-English bilinguals than for Polish-English bilinguals, which may reflect the perceived distance between the languages.

This article presents a preliminary, data-driven study of a corpus of texts written by advanced Polish learners of English, which were analysed with reference to a baseline corpus of native-speaker texts. The texts included in both corpora were produced in similar circumstances (classroom setting), with the same time and word limit, and in response to the same task. We conducted a comparative lexical analysis of the two corpora, using corpus methodology (word lists, cluster analysis, concordances, keyness) to identify the most significant differences. The most important conclusion from this study is that advanced foreign language use may differ from native-speaker language use in ways which only become visible in larger samples of language, and the differences, if analysed individually, would not be regarded as errors and would go unnoticed. There is some evidence in the study that some of these differences may be attributed to cross-linguistic influence.