Convergence phenomena in bilingual children

Many investigators have discovered that in the improvement of two grammatical systems the two languages can influence each other. This phenomenon has been labeled convergence phenomenon. It has been argued by some researchers that convergence phenomenon is a child internal process reflecting that bilingual children, when confronted with a highly complex grammatical phenomenon in one language, will use the less complex analysis of the same grammatical phenomenon in the respective other language for both languages temporarily. However, convergence phenomenon may also be promoted or even caused by a so-called ‘‘parental contact-variety input’’, meaning that child data would simply reflect a so-called ‘‘contact-variety input’’ of the native language of that parent who, for a long time, has lived in an L2 majority environment and thus shows some inherent cross linguistic interference himself. The aim of the present research is to argue that a contact variety approach cannot account for cross-linguistic influence in early bilingualism. The effects of cross-linguistic influence depend on language complexity and on the bilingual’s fluency

Keywords:

Bilingual language acquisition , Convergence phenomena , Parental language input , Language influence in adults , Subject realization Word order