The BilProcess project was conducted with activities and tasks broken down into 6 work-packages and an additional seventh WP which was added in July 2017. These WP correspond to a breakdown of the above-mentioned research questions. Bilingual children and French adult learners of English were tested experimentally on their comprehension and production of determiners in French and English.
Across packages, materials for a total of 5 experiments were created in both languages. In the UK and France, 87 children were tested in 4 schools and 146 adult participants were tested in 3 universities. All the participants took part in all the tasks in their respective language(s).
WP3 indicates that L2 learners are influenced by their L1 whilst learning their L2 at the determiner level. French learners of English over-accept ungrammatical THE+NOUN, especially with mass nouns (e.g. milk, water). But, they actually identify at intermediate level the correct article use with plural nouns (e.g. apples). Differences across tasks shows that intermediate learners have not yet automatized their explicit knowledge of article use. But, advanced learners have formed some implicit knowledge of article use as they perform well in the task tapping into implicit knowledge.
WP4 shows that French-English bilingual children are vulnerable to cross-linguistic influence in both direction in their interpretation of determiner phrases. In English, they, like adults, have difficulties with mass nouns but not with plural nouns. Reduced English input increases this effect. School differences indicate that the instruction of grammar can compensate this reduced input. Performance increases with age indicating that determiner use is not yet fully settled between 8 and 10. In French, the bilinguals display greater flexibility at accepting ungrammatical sentences in the explicit task than in the implicit task indicating that they have fully acquired French article use but are consciously more flexible to speech errors.
WP5 involved a comparison of the outcomes of WP3-4. But it has been delayed by the work carried out in WP7.
WP7 indicates that cross-linguistic influence was observed in the adults and children’s production. Noun type (mass nouns vs. plural nouns) affects our participants’ production as they are less accurate with mass nouns (e.g. milk) than plural nouns (e.g. apples). However, accuracy increases with increased exposure to the target language and increased proficiency.
WP6 corresponds to the impact section. The fellow steered out an application for her host lab to become a branch of Bilingualism Matters an outreach centre that provides information about bilingualism to parents, school and language professionals in the south east of England. As director of the branch, she organised (a) regular parent night information sessions, (b) parent workshops in primary schools, and (c) a series of informative short talks as part of the ESRC festival of social sciences. She also represented the branch at several language festivals and published general information on social medias. As for scientific dissemination, she posted several blog entries on research methods aimed at postgraduates.
