Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous bilingual children has been a matter of debate. There are linguists who believe the stronger language affects the weaker one (Tomasello, 2003) and there are those who claim cross-linguistic influence happens both ways, regardless of language strength (Döpke, 1999). This thesis investigated cross-linguistic influence in the negation development of an English-Dutch bilingual child (1;06-2;03). English and Dutch negation is comparable, yet there are differences which the child may overgeneralise from one language to another. Two methods were adopted to examine any cross-linguistic influence. The negator frequency in the input and the child’s speech was compared to determine whether the emergence of the negators in the child imitated the input (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2007). The child indeed started with the negators that were most frequent in the input, which supports a usage-based theory of negation acquisition. A syntactic comparison of the negated utterances showed that the child used some non-target patterns which were not attested in the input. The second method compared monolingual (Hoekstra and Jordens, 1994) and bilingual negation development (Schelleter, 2000). The bilingual child’s development largely conformed to his English and Dutch monolingual peers. Nevertheless, some non-target structures indicated that the child transferred English patterns to Dutch. The findings thus support a language strength hypothesis.
