A Spanish-English bilingual child frequently uses Spanish sentence structure when speaking English—for example, saying 'The house green' instead of 'The green house.' Which mechanism primarily explains this phenomenon?

💡 Explanation

The child exhibits language transfer because the syntactic rules of Spanish are being applied to English, resulting in non-standard word order. Therefore, the error arises from the direct influence of the first language's grammar, rather than lexical borrowing or phonological effects.

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