Elly Koutamanis defends thesis 22 March

Link to live-stream

When bilingual children use one language, they may be influenced by their knowledge of their other language. While such cross-linguistic influence is known to occur in children at the morpho-syntactic level, lexical effects have mostly been studied in bilingual adults. It is unclear to what extent bilingual children’s two languages also influence each other at the lexical level. This thesis therefore aims to uncover the internal structure of the bilingual child’s lexicon and the processes that may lead to lexical cross-linguistic influence. In doing so, it also examines the role of various individual-level, task- and context-level, and language-level factors in the way lexical cross-linguistic influence may emerge.