A shared linguistic system of multilingual representations

This chapter discusses multilingual linguistic representations and probes the question of whether they form a shared linguistic system. Recent psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies of multilingual individuals suggest that this is indeed the case. Taking Minimalist morphosyntax and Lardiere’s (2009) feature reassembly as starting points, we consider whether a feature bundle can be updated and re-assembled as a complete unit in the third language, or whether it has to be broken down into separate features which are updated separately. The latter option makes sure that features from both known languages, if they are acquired to a functional level, can exert crosslinguistic influence. Restructuring each feature bundle depends not just on the availability of facilitation, but on other properties of the input which affect what becomes intake in the additional grammar. Both experiential factors (such as dominance and proficiency) and linguistic factors (such as frequency in the input and complexity) can and do affect the acquisition process