This paper has as its starting point the assumption that in acquiring two languages from birth, bilingual children separate their grammars from very early on. This does not, however, exclude cross-linguistic influence – the possible influence of one language on the other. The main focus of the paper is on the acquisition of syntax in a generative framework. We argue that cross-linguistic influence can occur if (1) an interface level between two modules of grammar is involved, and (2) the two languages overlap at the surface level. We show that both conditions hold for object drop, but not for root infinitives. Root infinitives satisfy the first condition: they involve the interface between syntax and pragmatics. However, they do not satisfy the second condition. Therefore, we expect cross-linguistic influence to occur only in the domain of object drop and not in the domain of root infinitives. Comparing the development of the two phenomena in a bilingual Dutch–French and a German–Italian child to the development in monolingual children, we show that this prediction is borne out by our data. Moreover, this confirms the hypothesis that cross-linguistic influence is due to language internal factors and not to language external factors such as language dominance: the periods during which we observe influence in the domain of object drop and non-influence in the domain of root infinitives are identical.

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 in¯uence in bilingual children: the Germanic language in¯uences the Romance language. Crosslinguistic in¯uence 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-speci®c rules as quickly as the monolinguals, since s/he is confronted with a much wider range of language-speci®c syntactic possibilities. One of the possibilities seems to be compatible with a universal strategy. We would like to argue for the existence of crosslinguistic in¯uence, induced by the mapping of universal principles onto language-speci®c principles ± in particular, pragmatic onto syntactic principles. This in¯uence will be de®ned as mapping induced in¯uence. We will account for the object omissions by postulating an empty discourse-connected PRO in pre-S position (Mu Èller, Crysmann, and Kaiser, 1996;. Like monolingual children, bilingual children use this possibility until they show evidence of the C-system (the full clause) in its target form.

The focus of this study is the acquisition of grammatical gender in Greek and Dutch by bilingual children whose other language is English. Although grammatical gender languages share the property of noun classification in terms of grammatical gender, there are important differences between the languages under investigation here in terms of both the morphological cues for gender marking available to the child and the developmental path followed by monolingual children. Dutch offers limited input cues for grammatical gender, but Greek shows consistent and regular patterns of morphological gender marking on all members of the nominal paradigm. This difference is associated with the precocious pattern of gender acquisition in Greek and the attested delay in monolingual Dutch development. We explore the development of gender in Dutch and Greek with the aim of disentangling input from age of onset effects in bilingual children who vary in the age of first exposure to Dutch or Greek. Our findings suggest that although bilingual Greek children encounter fewer difficulties in gender acquisition compared to bilingual Dutch children, amount of input constitutes a predictive factor for the pattern attested in both cases. Age of onset effects could be partly responsible for differences between simultaneous and successive bilinguals in Greek, but this is clearly not the case for Dutch. Our findings are also addressed from the more general perspective of the status of “early” and “late” phenomena in monolingual acquisition and the advantages of investigating these from the bilingual perspective.

The goal of this article is to examine the factors that are proposed in the literature to explain the success-failure in the child L2 (second language) acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch definite determiners. Focusing on four different groups of bilingual children, we discuss four external success factors put forward in the literature: (1) early age of onset, (2) lengthy and intensive input, (3) the quality of the input and (4) the role of the other language. We argue that the first two factors may indeed contribute to explaining the differences in success between the less and more successful bilingual children. However, the influence of the quality of the input in (standard) Dutch appears to be inconclusive, whereas the (structural) similarity of the gender systems in the two languages may reinforce the children's awareness of the grammatical gender category. Moreover, it appears that individual bilingualism vs. societal bilingualism, that is the sociolinguistic context in which Dutch is acquired, is not a factor for failure or success with respect to the acquisition of grammatical gender. In the final part of this article, we hypothesize that the important role of the input is related to a language internal factor, which distinguishes the Dutch gender system of the definite determiner from that of other languages, resulting in different acquisition paths.

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