Age and Input in Early ChildBilingualism: The Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in Dutch

Publication Summary

Child second language (L2) acquisition has been studied in terms of the ultimate attainment which children reach and – to a lesser extent – the developmental stages they pass through on the way to that end state. With respect to ultimate attainment, it is generally assumed that L2 children will become nativelike, although there are recent data suggesting otherwise (Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson 2003; McDonald 2000). Child L2 development remains relatively under-researched (see e.g. Schwartz to appear). This paper investigates both ultimate attainment and development in child L2 acquisition: ultimate attainment is examined in terms of whether L2 children attain nativelike levels of knowledge, and development in terms of the developmental errors which children make. An increasing number of studies on child L2 acquisition are adopting a comparative approach, whereby L2 children are compared with other learner groups. Comparisons have thus been made with typical monolingual first language (L1) children (e.g. Haznedar 2001; 2003), bilingual L1 (2L1) children (e.g. Kroffke and Rothweiler 2006), L2 adults (Blom, Polisenska and Weerman 2005; Gilkerson 2005; Unsworth 2005) and SLI children (Paradis and Crago 2000). Such cross-group comparisons are used to disentangle the role of different factors in child L2 ultimate attainment/development, including age of first exposure, the role of the L1, L2 proficiency, and type and amount of input. This paper investigates the role of input and age of first exposure in English-speaking children acquiring grammatical gender in Dutch by comparing L2 children with 2L1 and monolingual L1 children. The following questions are addressed: (i) In their acquisition of gender, do L2/2L1 children pass through similar stages to monolingual L1 children? (ii) Do L2/2L1 children fossilise in a nontargetlike stage, as has been suggested in some studies? (iii) What is the role of age of first exposure and of the quantity/quality of input? Section 2 provides a brief overview of grammatical gender in Dutch and previous acquisition studies. In section 3, predictions are formulated based on these previous studies and these are subsequently tested using a new L2/2L1 child population. The results of this investigation are compared with previous findings in section 4, where possible explanations for the new findings are also suggested.