Predictors of cross-linguistic influence in school-age child and adolescent heritage speakers: The case of wh -fronting in Mandarin

This study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in the production of wh-questions by child heritage speakers of Mandarin aged 6;9 to 16;2 years in Canada. The form of CLI addressed is wh-fronting in Mandarin object-questions (where fronting is ungrammatical) and when-questions (where fronting is dispreferred). Our goals were, first, to determine whether the children front more frequently relative to their mothers; and second, to determine the impact of structural overlap between languages (operationalized by question type), relative language dominance, and age on the rate of children's fronting. Results show that the children front more frequently, and in more contexts, than do their mothers, indicating CLI. Structural overlap increased the likelihood of fronting for only some children, whereas greater dominance in English increased the likelihood of fronting for the group. Age did not correlate with changes in rates of fronting, indicating that CLI may sometimes reflect permanent divergence from the parental grammar.