Children who grow up as second- or third-generation immigrants typically acquire and speak the
minority language at home and the majority language at school. Recurrently these children have
been the subject of controversial debates about their linguistic abilities in relation to their
educational success. However such debates fail to recognise that variation in bilinguals'
language processing is a phenomenon in its own right that results from the dynamic influence of
one language on another. This volume provides insight into cross-linguistic influence in
Turkish-German and Turkish-French bilingual children and uncovers the nature of variation in L1
and L2 oral motion event descriptions by evaluating the impact of language-specific patterns
and language dominance. The results indicate that next to typological differences between the
speakers' L1 and L2 language dominance has an impact on the type and direction of influence.
However the author argues that most variation can be explained by L1 L2 usage preferences.
Bilinguals make frequent use of patterns that exist in both languages but are unequally
preferred by monolingual speakers. This finding underlines the importance of usage-based
approaches in SLA.
