In a recent meta-analysis (van Dijk et al., 2022), we showed that existing studies of cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children vary in many different ways: not only in their methodology and the linguistic property under study, but also in their operationalisation of cross-linguistic influence and its predictors, as well as in the systematicity in which they test for cross-linguistic influence. Consequently, whilst ample evidence exists for cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children’s language production and comprehension, the exact mechanism behind it and its predictors such as language dominance and language overlap remain under debate. Moreover, the meta-analysis showed that virtually all included studies were underpowered. This means that results from individual studies need to be interpreted carefully.
Meta-CLI is a collaborative tool for researchers in the field of child bilingualism where they can share and use data on cross-linguistic influence to overcome limitations of individual experimental work. Meta-CLI is a community-augmented meta-analysis. This is a combination of a meta-analysis and an open repository. In contrast to the traditional, static meta-analysis, community-augmented meta-analyses are dynamic and as such, serve as a continuously updated retrospective summary of previous studies whilst at the same time facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of a specific research question (see Tsuji, Bergmann & Cristia, 2014).
The goals of Meta-CLI are threefold: (i) to accumulate more and systematic evidence about cross-linguistic influence by allowing researchers to add their experimental results on cross-linguistic influence to the database from our original meta-analysis; (ii) to give the research community access to the latest information on cross-linguistic influence; and (iii) ito allow scholars to run their own meta-analyses on (a subset of) the database. Results of these analyses will not only further our understanding of cross-linguistic influence, they can also be used by individual researchers to calculate power analyses when designing future studies.
Meta-CLI can be accessed via https://cls.ru.nl/meta-CLI/. Further information as well as instructions on how to use Meta-CLI are available in this tutorial paper.
Acknowledgements
The Meta-CLI app was developed in collaboration with the Humanities Lab at the Faculty of Arts, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In particular, we are grateful to Wessel Stoop, Erwin Komen and Susan Even for their patience and persistence in developing (and re- developing) this tool.
