The acquisition of the determiner phrase in bilingual and second language French

Abstract

This study deals with the acquisition of Functional Categories in the French Determiner Phrase. The development of determiners and prenominal adjectives in three bilingual Swedish–French children is compared with that of four Swedish second language learners of French. It is argued that acquisition is crucially different in these two cases. The bilingual children initially have restrictions on phrase structure, resulting at one stage in a complementary distribution of determiners and adjectives. These results support a structure building view of L1 acquisition. For L2 acquisition of the same structure, there is no evidence for an initially reduced phrase structure. This finding is explained in terms of a transfer effect. A preliminary comparison with the acquisition of finiteness suggests that, whereas there is some correlation over time in the L1B subjects, no such correlation is found in the L2 learners.

Definiteness in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian and some implications for the general structure of the nominal phrase

“…This is exactly what Granfeldt (1999) finds in his study of adult Swedish learners of French (both languages have a system of articles and mark (in)definiteness obligatorily). His results show that the class of D-elements (articles þ determiners) is productive from the beginning, that there are very few omissions of D-elements, and crucially, that the presence of a prenominal adjective does not affect the use of determiners negatively.…”

Variability in second language article production: beyond the representational deficit vs. processing constraints debate

“…There is, however, no principled reason why this should be so. In fact, a study by Granfeldt (2000) suggests that it is not. Participants in Granfeldt's study were Swedish learners of French.…”

The development of determiners in the context of French–English bilingualism: a study of cross-linguistic influence

“…A few studies have shown that the simultaneous acquisition of determiners in a Romance-Germanic language pair is vulnerable to CLI (Granfeldt, 2000;Hulk, 2004;Kupisch, 2003;Serratrice et al, 2009). CLI may occur (i) from the Romance to the Germanic language as an early convergence on the target use of determiners in the Germanic language and/or transfer in the use of a definite article in generic contexts (e.g.…”