Processing strategies used by Basque-French bilingual and Basque monolingual children for the production of the subject-agent in Basque

Abstract

Abstract We sought to describe the strategies used by 2L1 and L2 Basque-French bilingual children and monolingual Basque children to express subject-agent function in a free elicitation context in Basque. Based on a three-year longitudinal study, the analysis focused on transitive constructions requiring a subject-agent noun marked for ergative case. The results showed that the children mastered production of the ergative case marker at different ages, and used different psycholinguistic strategies to refer to the subject-agent. The majority of the bilingual children favoured topological strategy (i.e., marking of the subject-agent in the first position through subject-verb-object word order). However, the children with L1 Basque seemed to engage more in morphological strategy, through the use of the nominal ergative suffix. These data allowed us to discuss variations in the performance of bilingual children in light of the cue cost and cue validity concepts elaborated by the Competition Model applied to language production.