in grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, discourse, and reading. Language transfer often occurs when learners sense a similarity between a feature of a language they already know and a feature of the interlanguage they have developed. If this happens, the acquisition of more complicated language forms may be delayed in favor of simpler language forms that resemble those of the language the learner is familiar with. Learners may also decline to use some language forms at all if they are perceived as being too distant from their first language. Language transfer has been the subject of several studies, and many aspects of it remain unexplained. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain language transfer, but there is no single widely accepted explanation of why it occurs. Some linguists prefer to use cross-linguistic influence to describe this phenomenon. Studies on bilingual children find bidirectional cross-linguistic influence; for example, Nicoladis (2012) reported that bilingual children aged three to four produce French-like periphrastic constructions e.g. "the hat of the dog" and ungrammatical English-like reversed possessive structures e.g. "" (dog hat) significantly more than their monolingual peers. Though periphrastic constructions are expected as they are grammatical in both English and French, reversed possessives in French are ungrammatical and thus unexpected. In a study exploring cross-linguistic influence in word order by comparing Dutch-English bilingual and English monolingual children, Unsworth found that bilingual children were more likely to accept incorrect V2 word orders in English than monolinguals with both auxiliary and main verbs. Dominance was a predictor of this phenomenon; Dutch-dominant children showed less sensitivity to word order than English-dominant ones, though this effect was small and there was individual variation. Language dominance The term language dominance can be defined in terms of differences in frequency of use and differences in proficiency in bilinguals. How basic or advanced a speaker's L2 level will be is determined by a complex range of environmental, individual and other factors. Language dominance may change over time through the process of language attrition, in which some L2 skills begin to match or even overtake those of L1. Research suggests a correlation between amount of language exposure and cross-linguistic influence; language dominance is considered to have an impact on the direction of transfer. One study found that transfer is asymmetrical and predicted by dominance, as Cantonese dominant children showed clear syntactic transfer in many areas of grammar from Cantonese to English but not vice