Null arguments in monolingual children

Determiners in bilingual German–Italian children: What they tell us about the relation between language influence and language dominance

“…Members of the research team were: Katja Cantone (lacantone@hotmail.com), Tanja Kupisch (tanja-kupisch@gmx.de), Katrin Schmitz (km7schmitz@yahoo.de); cf. Müller et al (2002Müller et al ( , 2006 De Houwer (1990) counted the number of pauses under the assumption that more pauses may be associated with less proficiency (see Genesee et al, 1995 for criticism). The MLU is the most hotly debated of all criteria, but at the same time the most successful one, as it is adopted in all studies (see De Houwer, 1990 for criticism).…”

“…Thus, syntactic criteria alone lead no further here. Müller et al (2002) have proposed instead that children prefer less complex analyses to more complex analyses. 12 The analysis of article use in German and Italian presented above gives principled reasons for the assumption that German DPs are more complex.…”

Strong and clitic pronouns in monolingual and bilingual acquisition of French and Italian

“…Besides the observation that unbalanced bilingual children may not show signs of cross-linguistic influence (cf. Müller, 2004;Müller and Pillunat, in press), although there is a dominant language, Müller et al (2002) have shown that cross-linguistic influence may occur in balanced bilingual children. The influence appeared in relation to grammatical phenomena: phenomenon X of language A is affected at the same time as phenomenon Y is affected in language B (Müller et al, 2002).…”

“…Müller, 2004;Müller and Pillunat, in press), although there is a dominant language, Müller et al (2002) have shown that cross-linguistic influence may occur in balanced bilingual children. The influence appeared in relation to grammatical phenomena: phenomenon X of language A is affected at the same time as phenomenon Y is affected in language B (Müller et al, 2002). Furthermore, grammatical phenomenon Z may only be affected in language A, never in language B, i.e., influence may be uni-directional (Müller, 1998;Müller, Cantone, Kupisch and Schmitz, 2002;Schmitz, 2006a, b).…”

“…The influence appeared in relation to grammatical phenomena: phenomenon X of language A is affected at the same time as phenomenon Y is affected in language B (Müller et al, 2002). Furthermore, grammatical phenomenon Z may only be affected in language A, never in language B, i.e., influence may be uni-directional (Müller, 1998;Müller, Cantone, Kupisch and Schmitz, 2002;Schmitz, 2006a, b). Our study of a robust grammatical domain further completes a picture in which absence/presence of cross-linguistic influence is unrelated to language dominance or balanced bilingualism.…”