A comparison of the error profiles of monolingual (child L1) learners of Dutch, Moroccan children (child L2) and Moroccan adults (adult L2) learning Dutch as their L2 shows that participants in all groups massively overgeneralize [—neuter] articles to [+neuter] contexts. In all groups, the reverse gender mistake infrequently occurs. Gender expressed by Dutch attributive adjectives reveals an age-related asymmetry between the three groups, however. Whereas participants in the child groups overgeneralize one particular suffix (namely the schwa), adult participants use both adjectival forms, the schwa-adjective and the bare adjective, incorrectly. It is argued that the asymmetry observed in adjectives reflects that adult learners exploit an input-based, lexical learning route, whereas children rely on grammar-based representations. The similarity in article selection between all groups follows from the assumption that adults, like children, make use of lexical frames. Crucially, lexical frames can successfully describe the distribution of gender-marked articles, but they cannot account for gender in adjectives.

Grammaticality judgement tasks show that second language learners who started during childhood are significantly more accurate on judging inflection than learners who started after puberty [Johnson, ]. Although the observations suggest that the acquisition of inflection is influenced by age, there is no study that focuses on this particular issue nor is there an articulated explanation available for the observed age-related difference. In this contribution, we compare child L2 learners of Dutch to child L1 and adult L2 learners of Dutch in order to investigate effects of age on the acquisition of verbal and adjectival inflection. We hypothesize that adult agreement paradigms differ from child agreement paradigms, the reason being that adult learners cannot rely on syntactic cues, whereas children make reliable use of syntax in building paradigms. By effect, adult learners end up with non-targetlike small paradigms that contain underspecified suffixes. We focus on the types of errors in the three learner groups (child L1, child L2 and adult L2).

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Table 5 Probabilities of substitution of suffixes -en, )t and -ø (excl. root infinitives)Child L1 a 2% n = 239 3.5% n = 175 0% n = 262 Child L2 Turkish 6% n =194 4% n = 116 0% n = 134 Child L2 Moroccan 5% n =368 9% n = 192 2% n = 272 Adult L2 Turkish 32% n =136 8% n = 83 19% n = 113 Adult L2 Moroccan 24% n = 335 8% n = 188 28% n = 275 a The scores of child L1 are only from 3 to 5 years old population. The 6-year-old group reached ceiling levels for verbal inflection and was therefore not included in the error analysisThe online version of the article can be found under