The present longitudinal study investigates the acquisition of determiners (articles) in two simultaneously bilingual French-Italian children aged 1;6,12 until 3;5,17, one of them being French-dominant and the other one being Italian-dominant. Although French and Italian determiners and determiner phrases share some syntactic aspects, they largely differ with respect to noun length and lexical stress in the nominal domain. Prosody is expected to be a decisive factor in the early prosodification of determiners by French-Italian bilinguals. The analysis of more than 4500 noun phrases yields different acquisition paths and cross-linguistic transfer, which can neither be explained by linguistic structure nor by language balance alone. The results are analyzed within the generative framework. The proposed account integrates language-internal and external factors for determiner acquisition in French by bilingual children.
The present contribution analyzes the acquisition of subjects in French based on a longitudinal case study of a trilingual child aged 2;8–3;2 who acquired French, Italian and Spanish simultaneously. The three languages vary with respect to the null-subject property; French is traditionally characterized as a non-null-subject language, while Italian and Spanish are prototypical null-subject languages. Argument subject omissions in French are ungrammatical but frequently observed in monolingual children in early acquisitional phases, as are ungrammatical postverbal subjects which cluster with null-subjects. Bilingual children acquiring French produce fewer subject omissions and postverbal subjects. The present study also finds an acceleration effect in the trilingual child. The results are interpreted in light of a parameter setting which accounts for different verb classes at different locations with which the null-subjects occur, giving rise to ‘categorial CS’ or ‘congruent categorialization.’
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