The Acquisition of French Determiners by Bilingual Children: A Prosodic Account

Abstract

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.

Constraints on Acceleration in Bilingual Development: Evidence from Word Segmentation by Spanish Learning Infants

“…Similarly, Stahnke [20] also finds supporting evidence for the role of perceptual salience in the accelerated production of determiners. French articles are all monosyllabic, whereas in Italian a few are disyllabic, which makes the latter more prosodically prominent.…”

“…Possibly as a result of exposure to languages where production of determiners is obligatory more often, Italian-German and French-German bilingual children produce more determiners in German compared to monolingual German children [21,22]. A frequency-based account, however, cannot explain why two Italian-French bilingual children showed positive transfer from Italian to French [20], indicating that differences in frequency alone are inadequate to capture all cases of acceleration.…”

“…They argue that the language of the community, in this case German, is dominant and thus plays a role in determining the direction of positive transfer between the two languages of a bilingual child. Further evidence for this proposal comes from Stahnke's [20] data on the acquisition of French determiners in two French-Italian bilingual children-one French-dominant child who lived in Paris and one Italian-dominant child who lived in Rome. The bilingual child living in Rome outperformed the bilingual child living in Paris on the production of French determiners, possibly due to positive transfer from the child's community language, Italian, which has more prosodically prominent determiners than French (more on prosodic salience effects below).…”

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

“…The French system is argued to be more transparent than the German one, and to be of help to bilinguals in acquiring the German system earlier than the monolingual German child, although the numbers are quite close. Stahnke (2022) analyzes the use of articles in two French-Italian children (1;6-3;5). She observes that it is possible that the French of the French-Italian children is accelerated in comparison with monolingual French children.…”