Find in Library

From a socio-cognitive transdisciplinary perspective combining psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, this research paper studies the relations between manifestations of interlinguistic transfers and metasyntactic skills in 9/10-year-old French-Norwegian children. Its purpose is to assess whether these transfers influence access and use of the children’s metasyntactic skills in reading comprehension tasks. Following a mixed-method research design, data was collected with 33 bilingual French-Norwegian children registered in the 5th grade at the French school in Oslo. The children took part in a grammaticality judgment test written in French and containing errors due to Norwegian syntactic calque. Subsequently, 13 of the children involved in the experiment participated in a semi-structured interview in which they explained their answers. A group of French monolingual children also took the test in France. Statistical analyses of the test results show the existence of interlinguistic syntactic transfers which weaken metasyntactic skills when errors are related to the use of a preposition.