RT Journal Article SR Electronic(1) A1 Azaz, Mahmoud A1 Frank, Joshua YR 2018 T1 Bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in late bilingualism: Evidence from the container-content relation JF Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism VO 8 IS 4 SP 411 OP 445 DO https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15012.aza PB John Benjamins SN 1879-9264, AB The container-content relation represents a set of nominal configurations unexplored in the acquisition literature. Whereas in English the switch from a noun-noun compound (water bottle) to a noun-prepositional phrase (bottle of water) is associated with a semantic shift from container to content, Spanish and Arabic adopt single canonical configurations for both conditions, noun-prepositional phrase and noun phrase, respectively. Importantly, Spanish, Arabic, and English display structural overlap in the content condition maintained by head-first isomorphic strings. In the container condition, they show structural dissimilarity; whereas English uses a head-final construction, Arabic and Spanish consistently use head-first constructions. Results from an elicited sentence-reordering task demonstrate that advanced late learners pattern native speakers when tested in Spanish but not when tested in English. Additionally, when tested in English, Arabic-speaking and Spanish-speaking learners overextend their L1 canonical configurations to both conditions. Furthermore, bilingual native speakers do not perform at ceiling, suggesting bidirectional cross-linguistic influence., UL https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/lab.15012.aza