Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T22:33:09.490Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The role of age of onset and input in early child bilingualism in Greek and Dutch

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2012

SHARON UNSWORTH*
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
FROSO ARGYRI
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
LEONIE CORNIPS
Affiliation:
Meertens Institute
AAFKE HULK
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam and NIAS
ANTONELLA SORACE
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
IANTHI TSIMPLI
Affiliation:
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Sharon Unsworth, Utrecht University, Trans 10, Utrecht 3512JK, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

The focus of this study is the acquisition of grammatical gender in Greek and Dutch by bilingual children whose other language is English. Although grammatical gender languages share the property of noun classification in terms of grammatical gender, there are important differences between the languages under investigation here in terms of both the morphological cues for gender marking available to the child and the developmental path followed by monolingual children. Dutch offers limited input cues for grammatical gender, but Greek shows consistent and regular patterns of morphological gender marking on all members of the nominal paradigm. This difference is associated with the precocious pattern of gender acquisition in Greek and the attested delay in monolingual Dutch development. We explore the development of gender in Dutch and Greek with the aim of disentangling input from age of onset effects in bilingual children who vary in the age of first exposure to Dutch or Greek. Our findings suggest that although bilingual Greek children encounter fewer difficulties in gender acquisition compared to bilingual Dutch children, amount of input constitutes a predictive factor for the pattern attested in both cases. Age of onset effects could be partly responsible for differences between simultaneous and successive bilinguals in Greek, but this is clearly not the case for Dutch. Our findings are also addressed from the more general perspective of the status of “early” and “late” phenomena in monolingual acquisition and the advantages of investigating these from the bilingual perspective.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anastasiadi-Symeonidi, A., & Chilla-Markopoulou, D. (2003). Sinchronikes ke diachronikes tasis sto genos tis ellinikis: Mia theoritiki protasi [Synchronic and diachronic trends in the Greek gender: A theoretical proposal]. In Anastasiadi-Symeonidi, A. & Chilla-Markopoulou, D. (Eds.), To genos [Gender]. Athens, Greece: Patakis.Google Scholar
Armon-Lotem, S., Walters, J., & Gagarina, N. (2011). The impact of internal and external factors on linguistic performance in the home language and in L2 among Russian–Hebrew and Russian–German preschool children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 291317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austin, J. (2009). Delay, interference, and bilingual development: The acquisition of verbal morphology in children learning Basque and Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13, 447479.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barreña, A., Ezeizabarrena, M. J., & García, I. (2008). Influence of the linguistic environment on the development of the lexicon and grammar of Basque bilingual children. In Pérez-Vidal, C., Juan-Garau, M., & Bel, A. (Eds.), A portrait of the young in the new multilingual Spain. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Blom, E. (2010). Effects of input on the early grammatical development of bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 14, 422446.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blom, E., Polišenskà, D., & Unsworth, S. (2008). The acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Second Language Research, 24, 259265.Google Scholar
Blom, E., Polišenskà, D., & Weerman, F. (2008). Articles, adjectives, and age of onset: The acquisition of Dutch grammatical gender. Second Language Research, 24, 297332.Google Scholar
Blom, E., & Vasic, N. (2011). The production and processing of determiner–noun agreement in child L2 Dutch. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 265290.Google Scholar
Bruhn de Garavito, J., & White, L. (2000). L2 acquisition of Spanish DPs: The status of grammatical features. In Howell, C., Fish, S., & Keith-Lucas, T. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Carroll, S. E. (1989). Second-language acquisition and the computational paradigm. Language Learning, 39, 535594.Google Scholar
Carstens, V. (2000). Concord in minimalist theory. Linguistic Inquiry, 31, 319355.Google Scholar
Chilla, S. (2008). Erstesprache, Zweitsprache, spezifische Sprachentwicklungsstörung? Eine untersuchung des Erwerbs der Deutschen Hauptsatzstruktur durch sukzessiv-bilinguale Kinder mit Türkischer Erstsprache. PhD dissertation, Hamburg University.Google Scholar
Chondrogianni, V., & Marinis, T. (2011). Differential effects of internal and external factors on the development of vocabulary, tense morphology, and morphosyntax in successive bilingual children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 318342.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., & Felser, C. (2006). Grammatical processing in language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 342.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cobo-Lewis, A. B., Pearson, B. Z., Eilers, R. E., & Umbel, V. C. (2002a). Effects of bilingualism and bilingual education on oral and written Spanish skills: A multifactor study of standardized test outcomes. In Oller, D. K. & Eilers, R. E. (Eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Cobo-Lewis, A. B., Pearson, B. Z., Eilers, R. E., & Umbel, V. C. (2002b). Effects of bilingualism and bilingual education on oral and written English skills: A multifactor study of standardized test outcomes. In Oller, D. K. & Eilers, R. E. (Eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Cornips, L., & Hulk, A. (2006). External and internal factors in bilingual and bidialectal language development: Grammatical gender of the Dutch definite determiner. In Lefebvre, C., White, L., & Jourdan, C. (Eds.), L2 acquisition and creole genesis: Dialogues. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Cornips, L., & Hulk, A. (2008). Factors of success and failure in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Second Language Research, 28, 267296.Google Scholar
De Houwer, A. (1990). The acquisition of two languages from birth: A case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
De Houwer, A. (2007). Parental language input patterns and children's bilingual use. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 411424.Google Scholar
Donaldson, B. C. (1987). Dutch reference grammar. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff.Google Scholar
Dunn, L. M., & Dunn, D. M. (2007). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-4). Minneapolis, MN: Pearson.Google Scholar
Dunn, L. M., Dunn, L. M., & Schlichting, L. (2005). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-III-NL. Amsterdam: Pearson.Google Scholar
Dunn, L. M., Dunn, L. M., Whetton, C., & Burley, J. (1997). The British Picture Vocabulary Scale. London: GL Assessment.Google Scholar
Flege, J. E. (2009). Give input a chance! In Piske, T. & Young-Scholten, M. (Eds.), Input matters in SLA. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Flege, J. E., Yeni-Komshian, G., & Liu, S. (1999). Age constraints on second-language learning. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 78104.Google Scholar
Franceschina, F. (2005). Fossilised second-language grammars: The acquisition of grammatical gender. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M. (2002a). Command of the mass/count distinction in bilingual and monolingual children: An English morphosyntactic distinction. In Oller, D. K. & Eilers, R. E. (Eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M. (2002b). Grammatical gender in bilingual and monolingual children: A Spanish morphosyntactic distinction. In Oller, D. K. & Eilers, R. E. (Eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M. (2002c). Monolingual and bilingual acquisition: Learning different treatments of that-trace phenomena in English and Spanish. In Oller, D. K. & Eilers, R. E. (Eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M., & Thomas, E. M. (2005). Minority language survival: Input factors influencing the acquisition of Welsh. In Cohen, J., McAlister, K., Rolstad, K., & MacSwan, J. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M., & Thomas, E. M. (2009). Bilingual first-language development: Dominant language takeover, threatened minority language take-up. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 213237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Genesee, F., & Nicoladis, E. (2007). Bilingual first-language acquisition. In Hoff, E. & McCardle, P. (Eds.), Handbook of language development. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gilger, J. W. (1992). Using self-report and parental-report survey data to assess past and present academic achievement of adults and children. Journal of Applied Development Psychology, 13, 235256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, H., Paradis, J., & Crago, M. (2008). Lexical acquisition over time in minority L1 children learning English as L2. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 4165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Granfeldt, J., Schlyter, S., & Kihlstedt, M. (2007). French as cL2, 2L1, and L1 in preschool children. PERLES: Petites Études Romanes De Lund, 21, 643.Google Scholar
Gutiérrez-Clellen, V. F., & Kreiter, J. (2003). Understanding child bilingual acquisition using parent and teacher reports. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 267288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haeseryn, W. (1997). Algemene nederlandse spraakkunst. Groningen: Martinus Nijhoff.Google Scholar
Herschensohn, J. R. (2007). Language development and age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hoff, E. (2006). How social contexts support and shape language development. Developmental Review, 26, 5588.Google Scholar
Hulk, A., & Cornips, L. (2006). The acquisition of definite determiners in child L2 Dutch: Problems with neuter gender nouns. In Unsworth, S., Parodi, T., Sorace, A., & Young-Scholten, M. (Eds.), Paths of development in L1 and L2 acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hulk, A., & Roodenburg, J. (2008). Puzzles on grammatical gender. Lingue e Linguaggio, 7, 6791.Google Scholar
Hurtado, N., Marchman, V., & Fernald, A. (2008). Does input influence uptake? Links between maternal talk, processing speed, and vocabulary size in Spanish-learning children. Developmental Science, 11, F31F39.Google Scholar
Hyltenstam, K. (1992). Nonnative features of near-native speakers. In Harris, R. J. (Ed.), Cognitive processes in bilinguals. Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar
Jia, G., & Aaronson, D. (2003). A longitudinal study of Chinese children and adolescents leaning English in the United States. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 131161.Google Scholar
Jia, G., Aaronson, D., & Wu, Y. (2002). Long-term language attainment of bilingual immigrants: Predictive variables and language group differences. Applied Psycholinguistics, 23, 599621.Google Scholar
Jia, G., & Fuse, A. (2007). Acquisition of English grammatical morphology by native Mandarin-speaking children and adolescents: Age-related differences. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 12801299.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, J. S., & Newport, E. L. (1989). Critical period effects in second-language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology, 21, 6099.Google Scholar
Keating, G. D. (2009). Sensitivity to violations of gender agreement in native and nonnative Spanish: An eye-movement investigation. Language Learning, 59, 503535.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kohnert, K. (2008). Language disorders in bilingual children and adults. San Diego: Plural Publishing.Google Scholar
Kupisch, T., Müller, N., & Cantone, K. F. (2002). Gender in monolingual and bilingual first-language acquisition. Lingue e Linguaggio, 1, 107150.Google Scholar
La Morgia, F. (2011). Bilingual first-language acquisition: The nature of the weak language and the role of the input. PhD dissertation, Dublin City University.Google Scholar
Marchman, V., Fernald, A., & Hurtado, N. (2010). How vocabulary size in two languages relates to efficiency in spoken word recognition by young Spanish–English bilinguals. Journal of Child Language, 37, 817840.Google Scholar
Marchman, V., Martinez-Sussman, C., & DaleP., S. P., S. (2004). The language-specific nature of grammatical development: Evidence from bilingual language learners. Developmental Science, 7, 212224.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mastropavlou, M. (2006). The role of phonological salience and feature interpretability in the grammar of typically developing and language-impaired children. PhD dissertation, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.Google Scholar
Mastropavlou, M., & Tsimpli, I. (2011). The role of suffixes in grammatical gender assignment in Modern Greek: A psycholinguistic study. Journal of Greek Linguistics, 11, 2755.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDonald, J. L. (2000). Grammaticality judgments in a second language: Influences of age of acquisition and native language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 21, 395423.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (1997). The acquisition of the syntax of negation in French and German: Contrasting first- and second-language development. Second Language Research, 13, 227263.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (2009). Second-language acquisition in early childhood. Zeitschrift Für Sprachwissenschaft, 28, 534.Google Scholar
Montrul, S. A. (2008). Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Montrul, S. A., Foote, R., & Perpiñán, S. (2008). Gender agreement in adult second-language learners and Spanish-heritage speakers: The effects of age and context of acquisition. Language Learning, 58, 503553.Google Scholar
Montrul, S., & Potowski, K. (2007). Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish–English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11, 301328.Google Scholar
Müller, N. (1990). Developing two gender-assignment systems simultaneously. In Meisel, J. M. (Ed.), Two first languages: Early grammatical development in bilingual children. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Oller, D. K., & Eilers, R. E. (Eds.). (2002). Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2010). Bilingual children's acquisition of English verb morphology: Effects of language exposure, structure complexity, and task type. Language Learning, 60, 651680.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2011). Individual differences in child English second-language acquisition: Comparing child-internal and child-external factors. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 213237.Google Scholar
Paradis, J., Emmerzael, K., & Duncan, T. S. (2010). Assessment of English-language learners: Using parent report on first-language development. Journal of Communication Disorders, 43, 474497.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paradis, J., & Genesee, F. (1996). Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or independent? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 125.Google Scholar
Paradis, J., Nicoladis, E., Crago, M., & Genesee, F. (2011). Bilingual children's acquisition of the past tense: A usage-based approach. Journal of Child Language, 38, 544578.Google Scholar
Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, S. C., Lewedeg, V., & Oller, D. K. (1997). The relation of input factors to lexical learning by bilingual infants. Applied Psycholinguistics, 18, 4158.Google Scholar
Place, S., & Hoff, E. (2011). Properties of dual language exposure that influence two-year-olds’ bilingual proficiency. Child Development, 82, 18341849.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poeppel, D., & Wexler, K. (1993). The full competence hypothesis of clause structure in early German. Language, 69, 133.Google Scholar
Polišenskà, D. (2010). Dutch children's acquisition of verbal and adjectival inflection. PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Ralli, A. (2002). The role of morphology in gender determination: Evidence from Modern Greek. Linguistics, 40, 519551.Google Scholar
Ritter, E. (1991). Two functional categories in noun phrases: Evidence from Modern Hebrew. In Rothstein, S. (Ed.), Syntax and semantics: Vol. 25. Perspectives on phrase structure: Heads and licensing. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Rodriguez, E. T., Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., Spellman, M. E., Pan, B. A., Raikes, H., Lugo-Gil, J., et al. (2009). The formative role of home literacy experiences across the first three years of life in children from low-income families. Journal of Applied Development Psychology, 30, 677694.Google Scholar
Rothweiler, M. (2006). The acquisition of V2 and subordinate clauses in early successive acquisition of German. In Lleó, C. (Ed.), Interfaces in multilingualism: Acquisition, representation, and processing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Sabourin, L., Stowe, L. A., & de Haan, G. J. (2006). Transfer effects in learning a second-language grammatical gender system. Second Language Research, 22, 129.Google Scholar
Scheele, A. F., Leseman, P. P. M., & Mayo, A. Y. (2010). The home language environment of monolingual and bilingual children and their language proficiency. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31, 117140.Google Scholar
Schwartz, B. D. (2004). Why child L2 acquisition? In Kampen, J. Van & Baauw, S. (Eds.), Proceedings of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 2003 (LOT Occasional Series). Utrecht: Utrecht University.Google Scholar
Schwartz, M., Kozminsky, E., & Leikin, M. (2009). Delayed acquisition of irregular inflectional morphology in Hebrew in early sequential bilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13, 501522.Google Scholar
Stavrakaki, S., & Tsimpli, I. (2000). Diagnostic verbal IQ test for school and preschool children: Standardization, statistical analysis, and psychometric properties. Paper presented at the 8th Conference of the Panhellenic Association of Speech and Language Therapists.Google Scholar
Stephany, U. (1995). The acquisition of Greek. Köln, Germany: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft Universität zu Köln.Google Scholar
Stevens, G. (2006). The age–length–onset problem in research on second-language acquisition among immigrants. Language Learning, 56, 671692.Google Scholar
Tabachnick, B. G., & Fidell, L. S. (2007). Using multivariate statistics. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, I. (2003). Features in L1 and L2 acquisition: Evidence from Greek clitics and determiners. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Étrangère, 20, 87128.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, I., Roussou, A., Fotiadou, G., & Dimitrakopoulou, M. (2007). The syntax–morphology interface: Agree relations in L1 Slavic/L2 Greek. Paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Greek Linguistics.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S. (2008). Age and input in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Second Language Research, 24, 365396.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S. (2011). Utrecht bilingual language exposure calculator. Unpublished manuscript, Utrecht University.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S. (in press-a). Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.Google Scholar
Unsworth, S. (in press-b). Assessing age of onset effects in (early) child L2 acquisition. Language Acquisition.Google Scholar
Valian, V. (1999). Input and language acquisition. In Ritchie, W. B. & Bhatia, T. J. (Eds.), Handbook of child language acquisition. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Van Berkum, J. J. A. (1996). The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender: Studies in language comprehension and production. PhD dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen.Google Scholar
van der Velde, M. (2003). Déterminants et pronoms en néerlandais et en français: Syntaxe en acquisition. PhD dissertation, Université Paris 8.Google Scholar
van Heugten, M., & Johnson, E. K. (2010). Linking infants’ distributional learning abilities to natural language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 63, 197209.Google Scholar
Varlokosta, S. (1995). Greek as a second language in minority schools of Thrace: Learning gender compared to learning number and case within the NP. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Varlokosta, S. (2011). The role of morphology in grammatical gender assignment: A psycholinguistic study in Greek. In Galani, A., Hicks, G., & Tsoulas, G. (Eds.), Morphology and its interfaces. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wen, Z., Miyao, M., Takeda, A., Chu, W., & Schwartz, B. D. (2010). Proficiency effects and distance effects in nonnative processing of English number agreement. In Franich, K., Iserman, K. M., & Keil, L. L. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar