The Acquisition of Branching Onsets in Simultaneous French–Portuguese Bilingual Children: The Effect of Age, Language, Cluster Type, and Dominance

The literature on bilingual language development often reports cases of cross-linguistic interaction of the two languages being acquired. In this paper, we investigate possible cross-linguistic interaction outputs in the development of branching onsets in the bilingual acquisition of French and Portuguese. Thirty French–Portuguese bilingual children, aged between 3;6 and 6;1, participated in our study. Their elicited productions were collected using two picture naming tasks containing 29 clusters in French and 57 clusters in Portuguese. Almost all the children acquire branching onsets earlier in French than in Portuguese, independently of the quality of cluster type (Consonant + Rhotic (Cr) clusters vs. Consonant + Lateral (Cl) clusters). Epenthesis is more present in Portuguese than in French. Shared structures in both languages are not acquired at the same time. These results show that bilingual children follow separate patterns of development, close to the ones reported for monolinguals, during the acquisition of their two languages. Moreover, the bilingual children show higher rates of development of clusters in Portuguese than the ones reported for monolinguals, suggesting an accelerated acquisition of clusters in Portuguese due to a positive influence of French.