The current research aims to predict L1 Papiamento and L2 Dutch reading comprehension development in 180 children in the upper primary grades (4–6) in a post-colonial Caribbean context from initial language of decoding instruction, cognitive and linguistic child characteristics, and linguistic transfer. Overall, children showed better reading comprehension proficiency in L1 as compared to L2 Dutch. Over the grades, strong autoregression effects in reading comprehension development in both languages were evidenced. Language of decoding instruction was found to predict L2 reading comprehension, but not L1 reading comprehension. The development of L2 reading comprehension showed better outcomes in the case of initial decoding instruction in L2. Word decoding, reading vocabulary, and grammar in respectively L1 and L2 were related to L1 and L2 reading comprehension in Grade 4, while L2 reading comprehension was additionally related to L2 basic oral vocabulary. Moreover, only reading vocabulary was related to L1 and L2 reading comprehension development across the grades. Finally, evidence of cross-linguistic interdependencies in the development of reading comprehension in L1 and L2 was found.

Over the past decades, bilingualism researchers have come to a consensus around a fairly strong view of nonselectivity in bilingual speakers, often citing Van Hell and Dijkstra (2002) as a critical piece of support for this position. Given the study’s continuing relevance to bilingualism and its strong test of the influence of a bilingual’s second language on their first language, we conducted an approximate replication of the lexical decision experiments in the original study (Experiments 2 and 3) using the same tasks and—to the extent possible—the same stimuli. Unlike the original study, our replication was conducted online with Dutch–English bilinguals (rather than in a lab with Dutch–English–French trilinguals). Despite these differences, results overall closely replicated the pattern of cognate facilitation effects observed in the original study. We discuss the replication of outcomes and possible interpretations of subtle differences in outcomes and make recommendations for future extensions of this line of research.

Homophony avoidance has often been claimed to be a mechanism of language change. We investigate this mechanism in Dutch by applying two strands of research – corpus studies and experimental data – to find support for claims based on earlier historical observations. Throughout the history of Dutch, homophony avoidance has been named as the cause of language change or inhibition of change on several occasions. We build on these historical observations with an experimental study and a corpus study on a synchronic Dutch alternation, where avoidance of homophony between present and past tense can appear. Plurals of verbs with a stem ending in a dental show homophony with the present when they are used in the preterite (compare zetten ‘put’ pst-pl with zetten ‘put’ prs-pl). This homophony can be avoided by using the perfectum (hebben gezet ‘have put’). A wug-style experiment shows that verbs with dental stem are indeed used significantly more in the perfectum in the plural than in the singular, while verbs without dental stem do not show this difference. A corpus study on Dutch further corroborates these results. Combined, these studies make a strong case for homophony avoidance as a plausible mechanism of language change.

In this article, we report a large-scale corpus study aimed at tackling the (controversial) question to what extent the European national varieties of Dutch, that is, Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, exhibit morpho-syntactic differences. Instead of relying on a manual selection of cases of morphosyntactic variation, we first marshal large bilingual parallel corpora and machine translation software to identify semiautomatically, in an extensively data-driven fashion, loci of variation from various “corners” of Dutch grammar. We then gauge the distribution of con-structional alternatives in a nationally as well as stylistically stratified corpus for a representative selection of twenty alternation patterns. We find that natiolectal variation in the grammar of Dutch is far more prevalent than often assumed, especially in less edited text types, and that it shows up in inflection phenomena, lexically conditioned syntactic variation, and pure word order permutations. Another key finding is that many cases of synchronic probabilistic asymmetries reflect a diachronic difference between the two varieties: Netherlandic Dutch often tends to be ahead in cases of ongoing grammatical change, with Belgian Dutch holding on somewhat longer to obsolescent features of the grammar.*

Every day people see, describe, and remember motion events. However, the relation between multimodal encoding of motion events in speech and gesture, and memory is not yet fully understood. Moreover, whether language typology modulates this relation remains to be tested. This study investigates whether the type of motion event information (path or manner) mentioned in speech and gesture predicts which information is remembered and whether this varies across speakers of typologically different languages. Dutch- and Turkish-speakers watched and described motion events and completed a surprise recognition memory task. For both Dutch- and Turkish-speakers, manner memory was at chance level. Participants who mentioned path in speech during encoding were more accurate at detecting changes to the path in the memory task. The relation between mentioning path in speech and path memory did not vary cross-linguistically. Finally, the co-speech gesture did not predict memory above mentioning path in speech. These findings suggest that how speakers describe a motion event in speech is more important than the typology of the speakers’ native language in predicting motion event memory. The motion event videos are available for download for future research at https://osf.io/p8cas/.

This paper addresses the relation between two types of word order variation in two stages of Dutch: OV/VO variation in historical Dutch and scrambling in present-day Dutch. Information structural considerations influence both types of word order variation, and we demonstrate by means of a comprehensive corpus study that they have a comparable pattern: given objects tend to appear earlier in the sentence than new objects. We infer from this that the two types of word order variation are diachronically related. Our findings support an analysis of scrambling as object movement from a uniformly head-initial base via the specifier of VP to the specifier of vP. We argue that historical Dutch allows spell out of the object in its postverbal base position, but that this possibility was eventually lost. Consequently, the boundary between the given and new domains shifts from the verb to the adverbial.

This paper discusses the regional variation in four ongoing sound changes in the Dutch vowels /eː,øː,oː,ɛi,œy/ that are conditioned by a following coda /l/. The synchronic diatopic diffusion of these changes is charted using the Dutch teacher corpus, a comprehensive dataset containing word-list data from four regions in The Netherlands and four in Flanders. Comparisons are made of the five vowels preceding nonapproximant consonants and preceding coda /l/. To avoid manually segmenting the oftentimes highly gradient vowel–/l/ boundary, GAMMs are used to model whole formant trajectories. Comparisons are then made of trajectories and of peaks of trajectories. The results are used to classify the nature of the four sound changes in terms of phonetic and lexical abruptness/graduality and to show that the changes are intertwined in such a way that they can only be considered as separate facets of a single, currently ongoing vowel shift.

This paper argues that the Dutch sociolinguistic situation in the 17th and 18th centuries should be analyzed as diaglossic, that is, involving a wide spectrum of variation in between localized spoken dialects and the supposed written standard. In fact, multiple instances of norm selection for writing render this diaglossic situation even more complex. The paper shows that multiple norm selection even occurred in cases when a strict and simple norm was selected early on, that is, in the late 16th–early 17th century. The case study is based on the Letters as Loot Corpus comprising private letters from the 1660s–1670s and the 1770s–1780s and focuses on the object form of the 1st person singular personal pronoun, namely, mij or mijn. Despite the early selection of mij, some language users in the late 17th and 18th century adopted mijn in writing. The analysis shows a normative split in written Dutch of the time, with most language users either converging to or diverging from the supposed standard form mij.*

Previous research on the effects of word-level factors on lexical acquisition has shown that frequency and concreteness are most important. Here, we investigate CDI data from 1,030 Dutch children, collected with the short form of the Dutch CDI, to address (i) how word-level factors predict lexical acquisition, once child-level factors are controlled, (ii) whether effects of these word-level factors vary with word class and age, and (iii) whether any interactions with age are due to differences in receptive vocabulary. Mixed-effects regressions yielded effects of frequency and concreteness, but not of word class and phonological factors (e.g., word length, neighborhood density). The effect of frequency was stronger for nouns than predicates. The effects of frequency and concreteness decreased with age, and were not explained by differences in vocabulary knowledge. These findings extend earlier results to Dutch, and indicate that effects of age are not due to increases in vocabulary knowledge.

In 1786, the Van Staphorst brothers, America's Dutch investment bank, entered the French office of the Director General of Finance, intent on making an offer for a portion of France's holdings of American bonds. Unknowingly, their offer set off a bidding war that could have ended with poorly capitalized American financial adventurers owing a large portion of bonds which could threaten the fragile health of American credit. At the eleventh hour, the Van Staphorsts conjured up a bold, unprecedented, scheme to persuade the French that it would be unnecessary to sell their American bonds at discounted prices.

This article builds on computational tools to investigate the syntactic relationship between the highly related European national varieties of Dutch, viz. Belgian Dutch (BD) and Netherlandic Dutch (ND). It reports on a series of memory-based learning analyses of the post-verbal distribution of er “there” in adjunct-initial existential constructions like Op het dak staat (er) een schoorsteen “On the roof (there) is a chimney,’, which has been claimed to be among the most notoriously difficult variables in Dutch. On the basis of balanced datasets extracted from Flemish and Dutch newspaper corpora, it is shown that er’s distribution in both national varieties can be learned to a considerable extent from bare lexical input which is not assigned to higher-level categories. However, whereas this yields good results for ND, BD scores are consistently lower, suggesting that BD cannot do with lexical features alone to attain accuracy scores comparable to ND. This ties in with earlier findings that the more advanced standardization of ND materializes in a higher lexical collocability, whereas Flemish speakers need additional higher-level linguistic information to insert er.