Determiner use in Italian Swedish and Italian German children: Do Swedish and German represent the same parameter setting?

Abstract

Abstract:In this article we compare the acquisition of determiners in bilingual children acquiring Italian simultaneously with German or Swedish. We are concerned with cross-linguistic differences in the rate of acquisition and we discuss in particular the Nominal Mapping Parameter, a model according to which the syntax-semantics interface is crucial in acquisition and which predicts similar developmental patterns for children acquiring a Germanic language. We show that Swedish determiners are acquired more easily than German determiners, which implies that predictions for developmental patterns should not be based on syntactic factors alone, but must make reference to typological differences in morphology and phonology. Furthermore, we show that the acquisition of Italian determiners is affected positively by the simultaneous acquisition of Swedish but that no such effect arises when Italian is acquired simultaneously with German.

Different Outcomes in the Acquisition of Residual V2 and Do-Support in Three Norwegian-English Bilinguals: Cross-Linguistic Influence, Dominance and Structural Ambiguity

“…Genesee et al, 1995; Bernardini and Schlyter, 2004; Lanza, 2004; Kupisch, 2007; Kupisch and Bernardini, 2007, but see Anderssen and Bentzen, 2013). We only consider non-syntactic mixing in order to avoid that the instances of non-target-like verb movement investigated in the current study affects the measure of language dominance.…”

“…Dominance has been argued to be an inherently gradient dimension (cf., e.g. Grosjean, 1982; Kupisch and Bernardini, 2007; Luk and Bialystok, 2013; Birdsong, 2015), and as such it should be possible for one of the girls to be more dominant in Norwegian than the other. If this were the case, the (inconsistent) whole-sale transfer of V2 observed in Emma’s data would be indicative of a stronger Norwegian dominance for her compared to Emily, who displays a very specific transfer of residual V2 to topicalisations.…”

“…The most frequently used measures relate to the (relative) level of proficiency in the two languages and/or the (relative) exposure to and use of the two languages (see, e.g. Kupisch and Bernardini, 2007; Silva-Corvalán and Treffers-Daller, 2015; Unsworth, 2015). Montrul (2015) includes all these three as different dimensions of dominance: the speaker’s comparative proficiency, input situation and opportunity to use the languages.…”

“…MLU (sometimes with additional measures and/or specific implementations) is frequently been used in corpus studies (see, e.g. Genesee et al, 1995; Yip and Matthews, 2000, 2006; Bernardini and Schlyter, 2004; Kupisch and Bernardini, 2007; Hager and Müller, 2015). A general problem with the use of MLU to compare proficiency in the two languages of a bilingual is that languages differ greatly with regard to morphological complexity (Döpke, 1998; Yip and Matthews, 2006).…”

“…Anderssen and Bentzen, 2013) and in some cases also leading to accelerated development, sometimes in combination with language dominance (e.g. in Kupisch and Bernardini, 2007) but not always (Liceras et al, 2011). …”