French Postverbal Subjects: A Comparison of Monolingual, Bilingual, Trilingual, and Multilingual French

Gil, Laia Arnaus; Müller, Natascha

doi:10.3390/languages3030029

Cited by 8 publications

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References 76 publications

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“…Arnaus Gil and Müller (2018) and Arnaus observe indications of acceleration effects with respect to the realization of subjects in French. The children studied cross-sectionally (only 23 of 57 children were younger than 36 months, the age at which monolingual French children have acquired the target system) acquire French, together with a null-subject language like Spanish, for example.…”

Section: Transparency As a Useful Concept?mentioning

confidence: 98%

AAiMLL: Acquisition Advantages in MultiLingual Learners: The Case of the Multilingual Child

Müller

2023

Languages

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Cognitive science has demonstrated that multilinguals (including children) show a cognitive advantage over monolinguals. Linguistics has provided evidence that multilinguals (including children) are able to successfully separate their lexicons and grammars and negotiate multilingual environments. Apart from these achievements, linguistics has generally failed to demonstrate a multilingual advantage related to the multilingual’s linguistic proficiency. The present article summarizes the current literature, which shows that there are first indications of an acceleration effect in multilingual children. This effect is discernable if the languages radically differ, if the child uses a ‘weak’ language (often a minority language), if the child acquires more than two languages from birth, and if contact with the language exhibiting the acceleration effect is delayed until kindergarten age. This kind of acceleration effect represents an explanation gap under current theorizing in cognitive science and linguistics, and calls for a new language acquisition theory, a best-of-breed solution for further research in language acquisition. AAiMLL (Acquisition Advantages in MultiLingual Learners) combines cognitive and linguistic aspects with a threshold theory. It is claimed here that the multilingual child learns from two cognitive acquisition strategies. One is fed by grammatical features, and requires the child to (re-)use already acquired knowledge by generalizing to new domains. The other strategy enables the child to consider rejected alternatives of earlier decisions in one language, for use in the other language. An acceleration effect related to the multilingual’s linguistic proficiency is indicative of the success of both strategies. The success of the strategies is argued to be related to a threshold of language usage from a quantitative or a qualitative perspective.

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Section: Transparency As a Useful Concept?mentioning

confidence: 98%

AAiMLL: Acquisition Advantages in MultiLingual Learners: The Case of the Multilingual Child

Müller

2023

Languages

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Chapter 5. Parameter setting in multilingual children with special reference to acceleration in French

Müller

2024

Language Acquisition in Romance Languages

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Linguistic theorizing has revised the switch metaphor of parameters as being part of Universal Grammar. Within an epigenetic approach to language (Biberauer et al., 2014; Roberts, 2019), parameters result from the interaction of innate (linguistic) knowledge and universal non-language-specific cognitive optimization strategies, which are set in relation to the child’s experience. Languages vary at different levels of granularity (Baker, 2014), which is expressed in a parameter taxonomy, more particularly in parameter hierarchies (Roberts, 2019) distinguishing macro-, meso-, micro-, and nanoparameters (Biberauer et al., 2014). In the context of multilingualism, Mac Swan (2000) has argued that some components of the architecture of the language faculty are duplicated in multilingual children, while others are not. Parameter hierarchies, defined as previously, belong to the non-duplicated components. Therefore, multilingual children set the parameters simultaneously for all their different languages at the relevant level of variation. Taken together, these assumptions can account for acceleration effects exceeding monolingual limits in multilingual French as a non-null-subject language, if (one of) the other language(s) is a null-subject language like Italian or Spanish for example. The results reported come from longitudinal studies of balanced as well as unbalanced multilingual children during early stages of language development (from 1;6 until the age of 5) and cross-sectional studies of multilingual children at similar ages.

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Parameter setting and acceleration

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Stahnke

Müller

2021

LIA

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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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French Postverbal Subjects: A Comparison of Monolingual, Bilingual, Trilingual, and Multilingual French

Abstract: Keywords: French; postverbal subjects; EPP satisfaction; cross-linguistic influence

Cited by 8 publications

References 76 publications

AAiMLL: Acquisition Advantages in MultiLingual Learners: The Case of the Multilingual Child

AAiMLL: Acquisition Advantages in MultiLingual Learners: The Case of the Multilingual Child

Chapter 5. Parameter setting in multilingual children with special reference to acceleration in French

Parameter setting and acceleration

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