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Determiners in bilingual German–Italian children: What they tell us about the relation between language influence and language dominance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2007

TANJA KUPISCH
TANJA KUPISCH
Affiliation:
Hamburg University/Kiel University
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Abstract

This study addresses the question of whether language dominance and cross-linguistic influence are related by investigating the acquisition of determiner omission in four bilingual German–Italian children. The study begins by showing that monolingual Italian learners omit determiners less extensively than monolingual German learners. If bilingual children had two autonomous grammatical systems, this contrast should be mirrored in their language acquisition. The analysis suggests the contrary. The bilingual children are compared in terms of language balance and language influence in determiner use. Based on the analysis, I argue that influence is not dependent on language dominance alone. Rather, both language dominance and the properties of the target languages must be taken into account when predicting cross-linguistic influence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 57 - 78
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2007

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Footnotes

Most of the research presented in this paper was funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG). I am very grateful to Gisela Szagun and the authors of the Tonelli and Calambrone corpora for making their data available at CHILDES. In addition, I would like to thank the following people for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper or on the thesis on which it is based: three anonymous reviewers, Petra Bernardini, Jonas Granfeldt, Conxita Lleó, Jürgen Meisel, Natascha Müller, Suzanne Schlyter, and Frank Zenker. All remaining errors are mine.