This study investigates wh-in-situ transfer for sequential bilingual children whose first language (L1) is Korean and early second language (L2) is English. Previous research has shown evidence that bilingual children who speak one in-situ language and one wh-movement language often show transfer from the dominant language to the weaker language, and from the in-situ language to the wh-movement language. The purpose of this study is to explore whether wh-in-situ is transferred to English, under the influence of Korean. The research questions are as follows: Do K-E bilingual children produce more wh-in-situ questions in English than their monolingual counterparts? If so, do these wh-in-situ questions appear in illicit constructions?

The design of this study is longitudinal in nature, in order to best capture a holistic picture of the children’s productions of English over time. Seven K-E children spanning ages 2;4 to 7;11 were observed in their spontaneous play interactions over approximately two years.

The data consists of 120 recordings, which were transcribed and coded in ELAN. Monolingual comparison data were obtained from the CHILDES database.

Results show no instances of wh-in-situ in the children’s English; the bilingual children pattern similarly to English-monolingual children in wh-in-situ production. No direct influence from Korean to English for wh-in-situ formation was found, contrary to what has been found in studies with other language pairs.

This paper provides new evidence from a language pairing that has not been previously explored for crosslinguistic influence of wh-in-situ questions.

The findings suggest that a dominance approach or structural complexity approach to predicting crosslinguistic influence for bilingual speakers may not fully capture the conditions for such influence to occur and may require some modification.