And the wolf said: “How a tasty pig!”: Linguistic competence and interpreting skills in bilingual children
And the wolf said: “How a tasty pig!”: Linguistic competence and interpreting skills in bilingual children

Summary/Abstract: The study investigates the linguistic and natural interpreting competence of two balanced Slovak-English bilingual children (siblings) while comparing the lexical and morphosyntactic production of The Three Little Pigs story through an interpreting activity in both language directions. Our research lies on the assumption that bilingual children are also natural interpreters who possess a bi-directional third competence (Harris 1976). The main objectives are to examine how children perform interpreting tasks, what types of errors they commit and what instances of cross-linguistic influence occur during these activities. From a broader perspective, the results of our research confirm that bilingual children can faithfully interpret the story in both language directions from Slovak to English and from English to Slovak. Both respondents demonstrated a high level of linguistic (lexical and morphosyntactic) and pragmatic competence in interpreting, which was done without any additions or omissions that would alter the meaning of the source message in the target language. Errors occurred mainly on the structural level, most of them were developmental errors and errors resulting from cross-linguistic influence. The presented data shed more light on the nature of bilingual language acquisition in children and their interpreting skills which constitute a natural part of this process. The findings move the field forward through building a better understanding of the capabilities of simultaneous bilinguals, to support the hypothesis that in an encouraging environment they can become proficient communicators and successful interpreters.

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