"C'est comme la pierre de Rosette !". Étude transversale de la conscience métasyntaxique et de l'influence interlinguistique chez des enfants bilingues franco-norvégiens à Oslo

International audienceRecent studies on second language acquisition and bi/multilingualism have shown evidence of cross-linguistic influence when assessing metalinguistic awareness. Syntactic transfers related to word order patterns between two languages have been well-documented. However, to date no research has investigated that link between French and Norwegian, and bilingual family language policy. In a sociocognitive, Bilingual First Language Acquisition framework, using a mixed method research design, this cross-sectional research aims to investigate the link between cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism between French and Norwegian, metasyntactic awareness, and family language planning and practices. Firstly, French-Norwegian bilingual children in the 5 th grade (n=33) and French children living in France (n=30) judged French sentences in a reading grammaticality judgement. Two specific Norwegian grammatical features were found to be potential sources of ungrammaticality: verb placement or use of preposition in prepositional verb. Secondly, Judgment strategies and corrections were collected in semi-structured interviews of some French-Norwegian bilingual children (n=14). Thirdly, parents (n=66) were asked to answer a sociolinguistic questionnaire informing about their attitude towards code-mixing and their corrective feedback. Results obtained from reading grammatically judgement task show high scores and no significant differences between French-Norwegian bilingual and French monolingual groups for grammatical/ungrammatical verb-placement related sentences. By contrast, monolingual group outperformed significantly their bilingual peers when the ungrammaticality came from preposition use. Thus, it suggests the existence of syntactic cross-linguistic transfer only when prepositions are involved. Moreover, qualitative analysis of metalinguistic discourse suggests metasyntactic skills, cross-linguistic awareness through explicit comparison between both languages, cross-linguistic influence from Norwegian to French, and controlled activation/inhibition of languages. Finally, questionnaires show attention towards code-mixing, explicit planning, and use of explicit corrective strategies. Findings contribute to our understanding of the link between cross-linguistic awareness, metasyntactic awareness in childhood bilingualism and family language planning and practices as well as of cross-linguistic transfer during reading comprehension task