The University of Manchester

Graduate Student, Psychological Science

Thesis Title: French-English Bilingual Children’s Encoding of Old and New Information

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PhD Title: French-English Bilingual Children's Encoding of Old and New Information

This thesis investigates the way French-English bilingual children encode old and new information in language-specific ways in their two languages. English and French differ in the ways they use word order to signal whether an element is new or old information from the listener’s perspective . French relies heavily on the use of dislocations where a phrase, typically a Noun Phrase, appears to the left or the right periphery of the sentence and is coindexed with a resumptive pronoun (e.g. Claire, elle est professeur/Claire, she is a teacher; Elle est professeur, Claire/She is a teacher, Claire). Although dislocations are a grammatical syntactic option in English too, their use in discourse is extremely more limited than in French. To date, little is known about whether bilingual children are sensitive to the subtle discourse-pragmatic constraints that regulate the distribution of word order in French and English, and, more specifically, the extent to which the regular use of two languages may lead to systematic cross-linguistic influence from French to English in the use of dislocations.

In this study, I am collecting a longitudinal corpus of three French-English bilingual children in conversation with their parents. The children, who all live in the UK, are video-recorded for one hour in French and one hour in English every month over a year. The conversations are then transcribed and coded by myself to identify what type of linguistic expressions and word orders children use to signal to their interlocutor whether they are talking about a new or a given entity.

This naturalistic data is being supplemented by an experimental study conducted with 20 French-English bilinguals in the UK, 20 French-English bilinguals in France, 20 French monolingual children and 20 English monolinguals (aged 5-6). The experimental task will elicit the children’s production of picture descriptions after an experimenter model of three different types of word order: Subject-Verb-Object (Le chien mange un os/The dog is eating a bone), left dislocation (The dog, he is eating a bone/Le chien, il mange un os), right dislocation (He is eating a bone, the dog/Il mange un os, le chien).             

The longitudinal data will provide an account of French-English bilingual acquisition of new and old information markers in spontaneous production, and will provide new evidence on the relationship between the parental input and the children’s productions. The experimental data will investigate the extent to which children can be primed to produce a word order that is grammatically correct but discourse-pragmatically sub-optimal (e.g. dislocation in English) as a function of cross-linguistic influence.

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