Bilingual first language acquisition at the interface between syntax and pragmatics

Hulk, Aafke; Müller, Natascha

doi:10.1017/s1366728900000353

Cited by 416 publications

(580 citation statements)

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“…The emerging grammars develop in a very similar way to the development of the corresponding monolingual L1 grammars. Hulk and Müller (2000) and Müller and Hulk (2001), among many others, have argued that cross-linguistic influence is nevertheless possible in certain vulnerable domains and in particular in the interface domain between syntax and pragmatics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Neuter gender and interface vulnerability in child L2/2L1 Dutch

Hulk

Cornips

2006

Language Acquisition and Language Disorders

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We examine the acquisition of grammatical gender of the definite determiner in Dutch by bilingual children from ethnic minority communities. The results show a complete acquisition of the neuter definite determiner (and demonstrative) by monolinguals (age 9;3-10;5), whereas the bilinguals of the same age perform at chance level. This can partly be explained by the fact that the Dutch nominal gender feature has a default (non-neuter) and a specific value (neuter). Furthermore, these bilinguals are exposed to a Dutch input that is quantitatively and qualitatively different from the standard Dutch input of monolinguals.Because the Dutch input is below a certain threshold, the children's access to the right morphological form regarding grammatical gender of the definite determiner in the storage component is not optimally efficient. IntroductionGenerally, in the (generative) literature on acquisition, a clear distinction is made between children acquiring two languages from birth (2L1) and children acquiring a second language starting between age 4 and 7 (child L2), although both are sometimes called bilingual 2 children. The most obvious difference between those two groups of child acquirers is the initial state of their emerging grammars. 1Whereas in 2L1 acquisition the two grammars emerge simultaneously, in child L2 acquisition the emergence of the two grammars takes place successively, at least for a large part. There are, however, also important similarities between the two types of acquisition, which, strangely enough, are rarely mentioned in the literature. Most importantly, in both 2L1 and child L2 acquisition the child is supposed to have full access to UG, as opposed to what is sometimes assumed for adult L2 acquisition. In that sense, both 2L1 and child L2 acquisition are more similar to (monolingual) L1 acquisition than to adult L2 acquisition. There may be more similarities since many children acquiring two languages may be situated in a kind of learning situation that has characteristics of both 'pure' 2L1 and of child L2 acquisition, as we will discuss more extensively later with respect to 'our' bilingual subjects. The learning situation is influenced by the sociolinguistic embedding of the second language (and its speakers). For instance, the second language of a 2L1-acquiring child can be the language of the family or the surrounding minority community the child belongs to. Hence, dominance of one of the languages may exist in the input, as may language mixing. Consequently, the sociolinguistic embedding of the second language may have an effect on quality and the quantity of the linguistic input.With respect to child L2 acquisition, the L2 grammar starts to develop at a moment when at least a (large) part of the L1 grammar is already in place. Therefore, although direct access to UG is possible, influence of the L1 grammar on the L2 grammar is to be expected, in the sense that the grammar of one language (L1) may somehow feed the emerging grammar of the other (L2). This influence is genera...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…12 Further research is needed whether this is related to the fact that there is no apparent (structural) overlap in the determiner systems in the sense of Hulk & Müller (2000) in the languages under consideration, and therefore cross-linguistic influence is not expected. …”

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confidence: 99%

Neuter gender and interface vulnerability in child L2/2L1 Dutch

Hulk

Cornips

2006

Language Acquisition and Language Disorders

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“…It has been argued that delay can be related to computational complexity. Hulk and Müller (2000) and Hulk (2000, 2001) define computational complexity as the coordination of information from different modules, in their joint research from pragmatics and syntax (Müller et al 2002). The main idea behind this kind of research is that the bilingual child will use the less complex analysis of grammatical property X as expressed in language A when using language A and when performing in language B.…”

Section: Delay Exceeding Monolingual Limits Due To Computational Compmentioning

confidence: 99%

Different sources of delay and acceleration in early child bilingualism

Müller

2017

Zeitschrift Für Sprachwissenschaft

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Abstract:The present article argues that the two effects observed in bilingual first language acquisition, delay and acceleration, have different sources. Whereas delay can be due to cross-linguistic influence on the competence or the performance level and to the mere cognitive burden to process two languages, acceleration is always rooted in efficient computation in a non-linguistic sense. The evidence for the difference between delay and acceleration effects stems from children who are raised bilingually from birth and who are studied during spontaneous speech production. It falls out rather naturally that linguistic development is immune to acceleration, while it can be delayed in bilingual children as compared to monolinguals.

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“…In the context of adult Second Language Acquisition, possible views range from full access/full transfer (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996) to more constrained views of transfer such as Andersen's 'transfer to somewhere ' (1983). In the domain of bilingual development, recent studies have generally assumed some form of structural overlap condition as proposed by Hulk and Müller (2000):…”

Section: Contributions Of This Volumementioning

confidence: 99%

The acquisition of Chinese in bilingual and multilingual contexts

Yip

Matthews

2010

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Significance of the acquisition of Chinese in bilingual and multilingual contextsThe study of how children acquire two or more languages is of both theoretical and practical significance. We shall discuss the theoretical significance of the acquisition of Chinese in bilingual and multilingual contexts from a typological perspective followed by its practical significance in informing parents and educators of how to nurture bilingualism, especially in immigrant and adopted children.A major variable in bilingual development involves the pairing of target languages. Among the many possible permutations, some language pairs are typologically and/or genetically distant, while others are closer. By extending the database from pairing English and European languages to typologically unrelated languages with very different structures such as Chinese languages, childhood bilingualism will be better understood. Salient properties of Chinese such as lexical tone, topic prominence, word order, classifiers and null arguments raise new possibilities for interaction between a child's developing linguistic systems. We shall discuss each of these properties in turn. The pairing of a tonal language with a non-tonal one raises new questions such as the interaction between tone and intonation. Case studies of Chinese-English bilingual children may be used to address questions about the development of tone and intonation, such as: Is word stress realized as high tone? And how does sentence intonation affect the realization of tone? In a pioneering study, Light (1977) discussed some striking features of his daughter Claire's 'increasingly Anglicized' Cantonese that were argued to reflect the influence of English in her new linguistic environment upon her arrival in the USA at 16 months. The shift from Cantonese dominance to English dominance in Claire produced anomalies such as 'disintegration' of the Cantonese tonal system with Cantonese sentences taking on an English intonation pattern.Chinese languages as target languages are of ever increasing interest to language acquisition researchers, and not simply because they are spoken by more than a quarter of the world's population. They are also intrinsically of great linguistic interest because of their genetic and typological distance from Indo-European languages. A well-known typological characteristic of Chinese is topic-prominence, which contrasts with subject-prominence in languages such as English (Li & Thompson, 1976;Shi, 2000). The acquisition of topic prominence and related structures in Chinese has been investigated in adult second language acquisition (SLA: see Jin, 1994;Yip, 1995;Yuan, 1995) but awaits investigation in bilingual acquisition. Chinese languages also exhibit a unique combination of word orders (Dryer, 2003). For example, only Chinese languages combine SVO word order with relative clauses preceding the noun; when this property is transferred to English in bilingual acquisition, it results in prenominal relatives as in example (1) from Yip and Matthews (2007b): 1(...

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Bilingual first language acquisition at the interface between syntax and pragmatics

Cited by 416 publications

References 19 publications

Neuter gender and interface vulnerability in child L2/2L1 Dutch

Neuter gender and interface vulnerability in child L2/2L1 Dutch

Different sources of delay and acceleration in early child bilingualism

The acquisition of Chinese in bilingual and multilingual contexts

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