Bilingual acquisition data: Object Overtness_OO-L1 dataset

Abstract

This investigation is focused on the crosslinguistic influence between the two first languages (L1s) of bilingual children in the domain of direct objects. We examine the oral production of bilingual children with two different language pairs (i.e., Cantonese-English and Spanish-English) and compare it with that of the monolingual English and monolingual Cantonese children. All the data have been taken from the CHILDES project (Child Language Data Exchange System; https://childes.talkbank.org/) (MacWhinney 2000) (i.e., Cantonese-English bilingual corpus: YipMatthews; Spanish-English bilingual corpus: FerFuLice; English monolingual corpora: Sachs, Bloom, Demetras-Trevor; Cantonese monolingual corpus: Lee/Wong/Leung). These corpora comprise spontaneous data where the children interact with adults in a natural context (e.g., at home). While null objects are possible and pervasive in Cantonese, their occurrence in languages like English and Spanish is rather restricted. The analysis of how Cantonese-English bilingual children produce direct objects in a quantitatively and qualitatively different way when compared to their Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual counterparts provides valuable information about the nature and the directionality of crosslinguistic influence between bilingual children’s two L1s; it also presents new empirical evidence for the postulation that the development of the two L1s in bilingual children is interdependent.