Sharon Unsworth

Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender

This paper investigates the role of amount of current and cumulative exposure in bilingual development and ultimate attainment by exploring the extent to which simultaneous bilingual childrens knowledge of grammatical gender is affected by current and previous amount of exposure, including in the early years. Elicited production and grammaticality judgement data collected from 136 English–Dutch-speaking bilingual children aged between three and 17 years are used to examine the lexical and grammatical aspects of Dutch gender, viz. definite determiners and adjectival inflection. It is argued that the results are more consistent with a rule-based than a piecemeal approach to acquisition (Blom, Polisenska & Weerman, 2008a; Gathercole & Thomas, 2005, 2009), and that non-target performance on the production task can be explained by the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997; Prevost & White, 2000; Weerman, Duijnmeijer & Orgassa, 2011).

Age and input in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch

This article investigates the effect of age of first exposure and the quantity and quality of input to which non-native acquirers (L2ers) are exposed in their acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Data from 103 English-speaking children, preteens and adults were analysed for gender agreement on definite determiners. It was observed that although most learners regularly overgeneralized the common gender definite determiner de to neuter nouns, there also existed child and adult L2ers who consistently produced the target neuter determiner het with these nouns (contra Carroll, 1989; Hawkins and Franceschina, 2004; Franceschina, 2005). Participants in all three groups produced het equally frequently with non-derived nouns as with diminutives, one of the few reliable morphophonological cues for neuter gender (compare Carroll, 1999). The present findings are evaluated in light of previous research (Hulk and Cornips, 2006a) suggesting that the quality of input to which L2ers are exposed may significantly affect their ability to proceed beyond the aforementioned stage of overgeneralization. Evidence for frequency effects and the observation that targetlike performance correlated with length of exposure suggests that quantity of input is a significant factor in the acquisition of Dutch gender. This is to be expected if the acquisition of gender is for a large part word-learning (Carroll, 1989; Montrul and Potowski, 2007)

Assessing Age of Onset Effects in (Early) Child L2 Acquisition.

This study compares the development of three different types of bilingual/second language children in their acquisition of gender-marking on adjectives in Dutch to investigate whether there is evidence for age-of-onset effects in early childhood as proposed by Meisel (2009). The three groups of children are: simultaneous bilingual children, exposed to Dutch and English from birth; early successive bilingual children, first exposed to Dutch between the ages of 1 and 3 years; and second language children, whose age at first exposure ranged from 4 to 10 years. In an initial analysis that included all children, early successive bilingual and in particular second language children produced qualitatively different errors from the other bilingual and monolingual groups. It is argued, however, that these errors resulted from transfer from the childrens other language, English. Once childrens knowledge of gender attribution is taken into account, similar error profiles were observed across all groups (contra Meisel 2009).

Testing Hulk & Muller (2000) on crosslinguistic influence: Root Infinitives in a bilingual German/English child

This paper considers whether the findings on the referential properties of Root Infinitives in monolingual children (Wijnen, 1997; Hoekstra and Hyams, 1998) are replicated in a bilingual situation. Testing a proposal put forward by Hulk and Muller (2000), the present study investigates whether and how crosslinguistic influence manifests itself, using original longitudinal data from a bilingual German/English child. The bilingual results are found to be broadly consistent with the monolingual data: there is no indication of either quantitative or qualitative crosslinguistic influence. Consequently, it is argued that these data show that Hulk and Mullers proposal needs refining. Suggestions are made as to how this could be achieved.

Early successive bilingualism: disentangling the relevant factors

Meisel’s article provides a novel outlook on the much debated issue of age effects in second language acquisition. Presupposing the existence of a critical period, he seeks to delineate the boundary between first (L1) and second (L2) acquisition. More specifically, his goal is to determine “the approximate age range as of which age of acquisition is likely to lead to similarities between the [child] learner’s language and adult L2 acquisition, while distinguishing both from (2)L1” (section 1., paragraph 3). Furthermore, he seeks to establish what the “problem areas” are for L2 children (section 3.2. and section 3.3., paragraph 1). Reviewing data from children who are first exposed to their L2 between the ages of 3 and 5, he observes that development in syntax for this group is relatively unproblematic (p.18), and this holds for a number of target language (TL) properties, including VO/OV, V2 placement, subject-verb agreement and interrogatives (Haznedar 2003, Blom & Polisenskà 2006, Hulk & Cornips 2006a, Rothweiler 2006, Thoma & Tracy 2006, Bonnesen 2007). Meisel concludes that none of these studies “supports the claim that syntactic development in early child L2 learners resembles adult L2 acquisition” (section 3.2., paragraph 4).1 This contrasts, however, with the domain of inflectional morphology (or at least parts thereof), where, according to Meisel, child L2 acquisition does resemble adult L2 acquisition. More specifically, in this domain, Meisel argues, the dividing line between L1 acquisition be that monolingual or bilingual on the one hand, and L2 acquisition be that child or adult on the other, lies around age 4. Meisel’s article raises many interesting issues which would serve as suitable starting points for further research. However, before such re-

Children's Interpretation of Indefinites in Sentences Containing Negation: A Reassessment of the Cross-linguistic Picture

Previous research suggests that childrens behavior with respect to the interpretation of indefinite objects in negative sentences may differ depending on the target language: whereas young English-speaking children tend to select a surface scope interpretation (e.g., Musolino (1998)), young Dutch-speaking children consistently prefer an inverse scope interpretation (e.g., Kämer (2000)). In this article, we suggest that these data are not as puzzling as they first appear. Extending a proposal put forward by Hulsey, Hacquard, Fox, and Gualmini (2004), we show that both English- and Dutch-speaking childrens behavior can be explained in the same way: children select the interpretation that answers the contextually relevant question.

Child L2, Adult L2, Child L1: Differences and Similarities. A Study on the Acquisition of Direct Object Scrambling in Dutch

This thesis compares and contrasts three different groups of language learners - second language children, second language adults and first language children - in their acquisition of the interpretive constraints on direct object scrambling in Dutch. A series of production and comprehension experiments is employed to document differences and similarities between these three groups. It is shown that in their production of scrambled objects in Dutch, English-speaking children and adults pass through the same developmental sequence. Furthermore, both second language children and adults come to know the interpretive constraints on scrambled indefinite objects. Taken together, these findings are argued to demonstrate that (child and adult) second language acquisition is constrained in the same way as first language acquisition. For both the first and second language children, targetlike production of scrambled indefinite objects is observed to precede targetlike comprehension. Following previous research in the literature, this delay is linked to discourse/pragmatic factors and, in particular, to limited discourse integration. The comparative approach taken in this thesis singles it out amongst studies on first and second language acquisition. Considerable attention is devoted to the methodological and conceptual issues implicated in such a three-way learner comparison. In this regard, an independent proficiency measure is developed to facilitate the comparison between the two non-native groups. This thesis is of relevance to scholars in the fields of first and second language acquisition and multilingualism, as well as theoretical linguists working on the syntax-semantics interface and discourse/pragmatics.

Contradictory information in the input as the cause of Multiple Grammars: Predictions for bilingual acquisition:

The central claim in Amaral and Roeper’s (this issue; henceforth A&R) keynote article is that everyone is multilingual, whether they speak one or more languages. In a nutshell, the idea is that each speaker has multiple grammars or ‘sub-sets of rules (or sub-grammars) that co-exist’. Thus, rather than positing complex rules to account for the intricacies of a given linguistic property, e.g. residual V2 in English, the theory of Multiple Grammars (MG) posits that speakers have several simpler rules which operate in parallel, something which the authors argue is more in keeping with minimalist grammar. The source of these multiple grammars is contradictory information in the input to the language-learning child. Even in monolingual societies, the authors claim, children are regularly provided with conflicting input as a result of, for example, language change and lexical exceptions to (morphosyntactic) rules. After developing multiple grammars to cope with this, children then use ‘linguistic cues to figure out which of [their] sub-grammars are dominant and productive, and which ones are lexically motivated and idiosyncratic’. The claim that adult speakers and/or language-learning children may have multiple grammars at their disposal is not new: Roeper (1999), in an earlier incarnation of MG dubbed Universal Bilingualism, and others (e.g. Kroch and Taylor, 1997; Yang, 2002) have used the notion of co-existing or multiple grammars to account for dialectal variation, diachronic language change and variation in first language (L1) acquisition. In the keynote article, A&R turn to (adult) second language (L2) acquisition, claiming that multiple grammars are ‘the primary source for optionality in all stages of adult L2 acquisition’.