It is generally agreed upon today that bilingual children are able to differentiate their two languages as early as the babbling stage, but that the child is able to make such a distinction does not entail that the grammar does in the same categorical way. This dissertation argues that bilingual grammar is integrated rather than isolated, on the basis of evidence of cross-linguistic influences in syntactic development: positive cross-linguistic influence, or ;;facilitation’, is captured within the same system as negative cross-linguistic influence, or ;;interference’. In analyzing the phenomena in Optimality Theory—a framework of universal, violable grammatical constraints—I show how an integrated bilingual grammatical architecture can explain those phenomena, which reflect a variety of structural representations, as arising from a grammar that does not fundamentally differ from a monolingual one. The empirical focus of the dissertation is on Spanish-English bilingual data from two experiments and from corpora of spontaneous speech, on the basis of which three main types of constructions are studied: predicative sentences involving BE verbs, wh-questions, and noun modification. Taking the traditional characterization of an Optimality-Theoretic grammar as a point of departure, each analyzed construction poses a new challenge to the architecture. The notions of ;;language tags’ within the propositional representation of an individual utterance and ;;split- and-tagged constraints’ that utilize those propositions’ tags in evaluating their own applicability are introduced in response to those challenges, as is a novel account of the cross-linguistic influences that can be elicited in real time. Implications for the architecture of the bilingual adult grammar are also discussed.
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Integrated bilingual grammatical architecture: Insights from syntactic development
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