The DP, a vulnerable domain?

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

“…In French, Anne consistently uses definite and indefinite articles and other determiners between 2;4 and 2;7. These findings are in line with research on French development (Bassano, 1998; Kupisch, 2003; Müller, 1994). From 2;8, Anne's decreasing use of French does not allow for an increase in the number of determiners.…”

“…This study does not include the collection of new corpora of monolingual data in English and French; for reference to monolingual development we refer to previously published evidence in the literature (see Prévost, 2009, for a thorough overview). The acquisition of articles in young English- and French-speaking children has been studied both naturalistically (e.g., Bassano, 1998; Bloom, 1970; Brown, 1973; Kupisch, 2003; Müller, 1994; Pine & Lieven, 1997) and experimentally (e.g., Garton, 1983; Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Maratsos, 1974; Stevenson & Sims, 1993; Warden, 1976).…”

“…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, 2007; 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., Les chiens sont des mammifères / *The dogs are mammals ); (ii) from the Germanic to the Romance language as a prolonged Bare Noun (BN) phase in the Romance language and/or transfer in the use of IPs and MNs in non-specific (e.g., I want cereals/milk vs. *Je veux (des) céréales / (du) lait ) and in generic contexts (e.g., I like chocolate/sweets vs. *J'aime (le) chocolat / (les) bonbons ).…”

“…Corpus-based analyses have examined the presence/absence of determiners in specific and non-specific contexts in early development. Kupisch (2003) observed a heterogeneous determiner developmental pattern in the corpus of two French–German bilinguals aged 1;1–4;0 (Céline) and 2;2–2;11 (Alexander). While one child, Alexander, did not show any evidence of CLI in French, the other child, Céline, showed a peculiar acquisition path.…”

Le Carte Blanc or la Carte Blanche? Bilingual Children's Acquisition of French Adjective Agreement

“…In the present study, we have hypothesized that learning to mark the gender agreement of French adjectives might be a frequency‐linked domain. Most previous studies of the acquisition of gender agreement have been with a Universal Grammar framework (e.g., Granfeldt, 2005; Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004; Hulk, 2004; Kupish, 2003; White, Valenzuela, Kozlowska‐MacGregor, & Leung, 2004) and have not explicitly considered the role of input frequency.…”