Acquisition of quantified partitivity in Catalan-Spanish bilingualism: Influence from child-level and language-level factors

Abstract

Abstract Child-level factors such as input quantity and quality have received little attention by studies of bilingual language acquisition in situations of societal bilingualism. The present study addresses this gap by investigating the acquisition of quantified partitivity in Catalan-Spanish bilingualism. The two languages present different licensing conditions for noun ellipsis in quantified partitive objects: Catalan requires quantitative clitic en whereas Spanish requires only the quantifier. Bilingual participants (N = 338), ages 4–9, were administered two Oral Production Tasks, one for each language. Analyses of participants’ responses showed that a different combination of child-level factors accounted for their performance in each language, revealing dominance effects. Once participants were classified into three groups (Catalan-dominant, Balanced bilingual, and Spanish-dominant) according to their language dominance, between-group differences were found in each language with respect to the acquisition timeline of the respective structure.