Natascha Müller

Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages

In this paper we want to compare the results from monolingual children with object omissions in bilingual children who have acquired two languages simultaneously. Our longitudinal studies of bilingual Dutch–French, German–French, and German–Italian children show that the bilingual children behave like monolingual children regarding the type of object omissions in the Romance languages. They differ from monolingual children with respect to the extent to which object drop is used. At the same time, the children differentiate the two systems they are using. We want to claim that the difference between monolingual and bilingual children concerning object omissions in the Romance languages is due to crosslinguistic influence in bilingual children: the Germanic language influences the Romance language. Crosslinguistic influence occurs once a syntactic construction in language A allows for more than one grammatical analysis from the perspective of child grammar and language B contains positive evidence for one of these possible analyses. The bilingual child is not able to map the universal strategies onto language-specific rules as quickly as the monolinguals, since s/he is confronted with a much wider range of language-specific syntactic possibilities. One of the possibilities seems to be compatible with a universal strategy. We would like to argue for the existence of crosslinguistic influence, induced by the mapping of universal principles onto language-specific principles – in particular, pragmatic onto syntactic principles. This influence will be defined as mapping induced influence . We will account for the object omissions by postulating an empty discourse-connected PRO in pre-S position (Muller, Crysmann, and Kaiser, 1996; Hulk, 1997). Like monolingual children, bilingual children use this possibility until they show evidence of the C-system (the full clause) in its target form.

Transfer in Bilingual First Language Acquisition.

Much research on bilingual first language acquisition has stressed the role of the dominant or preferred language when the two languages have some influence on one another. The present paper tries to look at transfer or interference from the perspective of the input the child is exposed to. Transfer will be argued to occur in those domains of the grammar where the language learner is confronted with ambiguous input. The bilingual child may, as a relief strategy, use parts of the analysis of one language in order to cope with ambiguous properties of the other. Ambiguity of input is crucial and will be evaluated through a comparison with monolingual language acquisition: if monolingual children have problems with the language material in question, it may be suggested that the input contains evidence for more than only one grammatical analysis. A quantitative difference between monolingual and bilingual language acquisition will be interpreted as evidence in favor of cross-linguistic influence in bilingual language development. The paper reviews longitudinal studies on the acquisition of word order in German subordinate clauses.

Gender in Monolingual and Bilingual First Language Acquisition: Comparing Italian and French

The present paper deals with the acquisition of gender in Italian and French by monolingual and bilingual children. In our study, which is based on the data of five children, we focus on the gender marking on articles, because gender is most frequently marked on these elements. We claim that the Italian gender system is easier to acquire than the French gender system. This is because the formal properties of Italian nouns and other gender marked elements are very transparent - more transparent indeed than the formal properties of the corresponding French elements. This transparency can explain the early and correct use of articles in Italian, as compared to French. Interestingly, a difference between the two languages is not revealed in the comparison of monolingual data. Apparently, the time span within which the children master the gender systems of their target-languages is so short that it is hardly visible. It is, however, visible in the data of the bilingual children, who acquire Italian or French simultaneously with German. The analysis of gender agreement on articles shows that Italian bilinguals have only slightly lower accuracy rates than monolingual Italians, whereas a significant difference is revealed in the comparison of bilingual and monolingual French children. We assume that the bilinguals are not less proficient in mastering their gender systems but they need more time, which is why their phase of learning becomes visible. It is suggested that this delay is not directly related to the second language, but indirectly in the sense that the children have less input in each of their languages. Apparently, this has an impact on children acquiring French, but not on children acquiring Italian.

Strong and Clitic Pronouns in Monolingual and Bilingual Acquisition of French and Italian.

The present article investigates the acquisition of the pronominal systems by French and Italian monolingual children and by bilingual German–French and German–Italian children, demonstrating a stable asymmetry: object and reflexive clitics are acquired later than nominative clitics and strong subject and object pronouns. We will widen the scope of former investigations to include the acquisition of strong pronouns and argue that the observed asymmetry can be accounted for if we combine the external (categorial status) and internal syntax of pronouns (internal structure). In particular, we argue for the relevance of the absence/presence of a nominal layer (N-layer) in the internal structure of a pronoun. This approach can account for the observation that pronouns containing an N-layer, i.e., strong subject pronouns, subject clitics and strong object pronouns, are acquired simultaneously and earlier than pronouns which lack the N-layer, i.e., object clitics and reflexive clitics.

Gender acquisition in bilingual children: French–German, Italian–German, Spanish–German and Italian–French

This study compares gender acquisition within determiner phrases between monolingual German children and bilingual children acquiring a Romance language (French, Spanish, Italian) and German or two Romance languages simultaneously. Furthermore, the two languages within the bilingual children are compared to one another with respect to the acquisition of gender. The influence of different factors on gender acquisition is discussed: language dominance, transparency of gender marking and/or reliability of gender cues in the respective languages. It shows that bilingual children can acquire the gender systems in both languages just as monolinguals and that bilingualism per se does not have a delaying effect. In bilingual children, as in monolingual children, German is most problematic in terms of gender acquisition. French represents only slightly more problems than Spanish and Italian, the latter two-gender systems being acquired with ease. Since adult phonological gender rules are characterized by their rather low validity in German and in French, lower accuracy with German gender indicates that the way how gender is marked in the languages influences acquisition more than the validity of gender rules; in German and not in French, gender marking is intertwined with case and number markings. Although our results suggest that gender accuracy depends on the language acquired, some children do not fit into the expected pattern of gender acquisition with respect to the analysed languages. Interestingly, all these children show a language imbalance. Therefore, we claim that the children’s gender accuracy can be predicted on the basis of the language acquired, but language dominance can blur this ranking. Interestingly, it is not the case that gender is delayed in the weak language of the bilingual children; language imbalance has the effect that the child may not tend towards the predicted side of an accuracy ranking (for the weaker language). A further result of this study is that accuracy on neuter gender is lower in bilingual German than in monolingual German, suggesting that the fact that the bilingual children acquire a two-gender system simultaneously with a three-gender system has a delaying effect for target-like neuter marking.

The null-subject parameter at the interface between syntax and pragmatics: Evidence from bilingual German–Italian, German–French and Italian–French children

This article investigates subject realizations and omissions in bilingual German–Italian, German–French and Italian–French children. The German–Italian children realize too many subjects in Italian, unlike the French–Italian child. The authors modify the criteria for cross-linguistic influence: this occurs if the vulnerable grammatical phenomenon is an interface property and if the surface strings of the two languages are analysable with the syntactic derivation of one language. All children produce target-deviant subject omissions in French and German. Odd omissions of subjects in French and German and odd realizations in Italian are all syntactically 3rd person. The authors argue for one explanation for all observations, namely the misinterpretation of the deictic nature of 1st and 2nd person as the anaphoric 3rd person. Odd realized and omitted subject pronouns are of the NP-type, independent from licensing via agreement and realized as default 3rd person.

Codeswitching at the interface of language-specific lexicons and the computational system

It has been noted by many researchers that young bilingual children pass through a stage of early mixing which extends approximately until the age of 2;6 and ends abruptly. Research on bilingual first language acquisition has clearly excluded the possibility to explain mixed utterances as the result of a fused lexical or grammatical system. However, the actual debate on the reasons for early mixing still continues. Two main approaches have dominated the field of language mixing in adults: One assumes that adults codeswitching is constrained by grammatical principles, suggesting that a third grammar is responsible for the grammaticality of mixed utterances (e.g., the Equivalence Constraint formulated by Poplack (1980), or the Functional Head Constraint formulated by Belazi, Rubin & Toribio (1994) among others). Since child grammar is supposed to be organized differently from adult grammar, the grammatical “ingredients” of the principles which constrain codeswitching are absent in early child language (Köppe & Meisel, 1995). It therefore follows that early mixing in young bilingual children is not to be considered as constrained by any grammatical principles. The other approach argues that codeswitching in adults is not regulated by external grammatical principles, but that the only constraints which govern codeswitching are those required by the two languages involved (MacSwan, 2000). We will show that this assumption holds for child language as well. Our analysis of mixing opens the perspective that child grammar can be considered to be organized in the same way as adult grammar. Furthermore, we will argue that early mixing is related to developing performance abilities, in the present paper to the readiness on the bilingual childs part to speak the language(s).

Die Schnittstelle Syntax — Pragmatik: Subjektauslassungen bei bilingual deutsch-französisch aufwachsenden Kindern

SummaryResearch in bilingual first language acquisition has shown that the two languages influence each other. One condition for cross-linguistic influence requires that the grammatical phenomenon in question be situated at the interface between two modules of grammar, the syntax-pragmatics interface in particular. One grammatical domain, which has been discussed extensively within syntactic theory, is the null-subject property of languages like Italian. The null-subject property is regulated in the syntactic component of grammar and the presence/absence of overt subjects is further restricted by discourse-pragmatic factors. French and German, although considered as non-null-subject-languages, both display a certain amount of null subjects. We will show that the presence/absence of overt subjects is not further restricted by pragmatics in these languages, contrary to Italian. Our prediction for bilingual first language acquisition is that we will find evidence for cross-linguistic influence in Italian-German, but not in French-German children. This prediction is borne out by the data. Our general conclusion is that only if syntax and pragmatics interact in such a way that pragmatics further restricts an option already made available by the syntactic component will cross-linguistic influence occur.

Delay and acceleration in bilingual first language acquisition: The same or different?

Research on bilingual first language acquisition has shown that bilingual children do not develop both of their two languages similarly to monolingual children. Two opposing views exist for the difference between bilingual and monolingual development. According to the first, cross-linguistic effects may either slow down or accelerate language acquisition. The opposing view holds that processing is at the heart of the difference between bilingual and monolingual language development. In the present article we will argue in favor of the position that delay is the outcome of cross-linguistic influence, where a linguistically less complex analysis is applied to both languages, A and B. We will show that delay effects depend on the language combination, and will compare German-Italian, German-Spanish and Italian-French children with respect to non-null-subject usage. At the same time, acceleration effects are visible in all bilingual children, regardless of the language combination. We will also argue that acceleration results from processing preferences. The grammatical phenomenon under investigation here is finite verb placement in bilingual German, which seems to be guided by principles of efficient computation. The empirical results allow for an interpretation of acceleration effects not in terms of cross-linguistic influence, but in terms of an effect of bilingualism as such. As a result, the differences between early child bilingualism and monolingual language development should be described in terms of the interaction of two knowledge systems and of processing effects in bilinguals.

On the Non-Parallelism in the Acquisition of Reflexive and Non-Reflexive Object Clitics

In this article, we want to study the development of French reflexive clitics in relation to the acquisition of ordinary non-reflexive object clitics. In Muller et al. (1996), we argued that the emergence of the full object clitic paradigm and its target-consistent use is tied to the instantiation of the C-system. As for the adult system, we assumed that non-reflexive object clitics license and identify a pro object in syntax. Reflexive clitics, however, involve argument absorption which arguably is a presyntactic process, yielding a syntactic representation with one thematic role less (Grimshaw, 1982; Wehrli, 1986). Given this, we would expect reflexives not to interact with other syntactic constituents, like e.g., the C-system. Interestingly enough, reflexive clitics are already used sporadically during a stage where their non-reflexive counterparts are still systematically lacking. Furthermore, placement errors are attested with reflexive clitics in constructions which contain an analytic verb form, errors which are nonexistent with their non-reflexive counterparts. Moreover, these placement errors coincide with the selection of the wrong auxiliary, namely avoir instead of etre. We will argue in particular that the acquisition pattern is attributed to the unavailability of complex morphological words in the child’s initial grammatical representation, i.e., morphological objects which map onto more than one single syntactic atom. In contrast to the target analysis in terms of a verb cluster, the children analyze French auxiliary+participle constructions as a hierarchical VP, where the auxiliary selects a VP complement.