Title:
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Cross-linguistic influence in the English of a trilingual child : a case study of trilingual acquisition
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This thesis is a case study of simultaneous trilingual acquisition examining a
child's (S) development of English as she acquires English, Italian and Scottish
Gaelic simultaneously from birth. It investigates the effect that the acquisition of
three languages from birth has on the development of the child's English.
S's trilingual language development is examined to see how it correlates to
monolingual and bilingual acquisition. Specifically, this thesis reviews S's MLU
development and her general development, whilst focusing on phenomena that are
salient in the acquisition literature, and compares it to the language development
of monolingual and bilingual children presented in the literature. It is clear that
although S's development of English is largely in keeping with that reported in
monolingual and bilingual acquisition literature, it differs to her monolingual and
bilingual counterparts in relation to target deviance.
The target deviance observed in S's data is examined in order to provide
evidence for cross-linguistic influence in multilingual language acquisition. The
first phenomenon analysed in detail looks at S's data only whereas in the second
phenomenon, elicitation tasks involving S and her bilingual peers are carried out to
support the target deviance observed in the spontaneous data. Grammaticality
judgement tasks testing S's English and Italian are also used to examine target
deviance in S's grammar. There are four prominent theories of cross-linguistic
influence in multilingual acquisition and this thesis examines the various target
deviant phenomena that can help us to understand each aspect of this
phenomenon that has received different explanations in the literature.
Overall, the results of this case study show that cross-linguistic influence is a
characteristic of multilingual language development. I propose that cross-linguistic
influence occurs as a result of the three languages in S's triad being activated
simultaneously, i.e., when a structure that is grammatical in S's other two
languages surfaces in her English at a stage when S's inhibitory control skills are
not fully developed.
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