The role of age of onset and input in early child bilingualism in Greek and Dutch

Abstract

The focus of this study is the acquisition of grammatical gender in Greek and Dutch by bilingual children whose other language is English. Although grammatical gender languages share the property of noun classification in terms of grammatical gender, there are important differences between the languages under investigation here in terms of both the morphological cues for gender marking available to the child and the developmental path followed by monolingual children. Dutch offers limited input cues for grammatical gender, but Greek shows consistent and regular patterns of morphological gender marking on all members of the nominal paradigm. This difference is associated with the precocious pattern of gender acquisition in Greek and the attested delay in monolingual Dutch development. We explore the development of gender in Dutch and Greek with the aim of disentangling input from age of onset effects in bilingual children who vary in the age of first exposure to Dutch or Greek. Our findings suggest that although bilingual Greek children encounter fewer difficulties in gender acquisition compared to bilingual Dutch children, amount of input constitutes a predictive factor for the pattern attested in both cases. Age of onset effects could be partly responsible for differences between simultaneous and successive bilinguals in Greek, but this is clearly not the case for Dutch. Our findings are also addressed from the more general perspective of the status of “early” and “late” phenomena in monolingual acquisition and the advantages of investigating these from the bilingual perspective.

Grammatical Gender in Norwegian: Language Acquisition and Language Change

“…This delay can be attributed to the opacity of gender assignment in Norwegian. This corresponds to what has been found for Dutch (another language with arbitrary gender assignment), where neuter gender has been shown to be problematic until approximately the age of six (Blom et al 2008;Unsworth et al 2014;Tsimpli & Hulk 2013). Interestingly, neuter gender marking on indefinite articles is shown to be acquired early in German, by age three (Müller 1990(Müller , 1999, despite the fact that grammatical gender is relatively opaque (Hopp 2012).…”

Gender assignment and gender agreement in adult bilinguals and second language learners of French

“…Nevertheless, while monolingual children eventually acquire the target system, it is unclear whether bilingual children ever proceed beyond this stage of overgeneralization. Since gender has to be acquired in an item-based fashion in Dutch, the relevant factor for successful acquisition is likely to be amount of exposure rather than age of onset (see Unsworth, 2013, andUnsworth, Argyri, Cornips, Hulk, Sorace, &Tsimpli, 2011). This may be similar for those nouns in French that are not covered by gender assignment rules.…”

Cross-linguistic aspects in child L2 acquisition

“…For example, L1 Dutch-speaking children have been shown to acquire gender much later than L1 Greek-speaking children due to the opacity of the Dutch gender system as opposed to the transparency and systematicity of the Greek gender system (Tsimpli & Hulk, 2013). The same asynchronous acquisition of the Dutch and the Greek gender systems has also been found in the context of childhood bilingualism by Unsworth et al (2014), who compared Greek and Dutch 2L1 and L2 children with English as their L1. Conversely, the study by Chondrogianni et al (2015) reported that Turkish-speaking children in the Netherlands and the UK acquiring L2 Dutch and L2 English definite articles respectively followed the same developmental patterns, due to the similarities of the semantic properties of the definite article systems in Dutch and in English.…”