Publication Summary
A large number of studies have shown that crosslinguistic influence in bilingual acquisition of interface-conditioned properties can occur in the form of delay or acceleration (e.g., Dopke, 1998; Hulk and Muller, 2001; Kupish, 2007, Haznedar, 2010). In this paper we investigate whether knowledge of both Italian and Dutch can lead to crosslinguistic influence at the syntax-semantics interface, by examining the acquisition of specific indefinite objects in children who are exposed to the two languages simultaneously. We will show that Dutch-Italian bilingual children assign the adult-like interpretation to scrambled indefinite objects in Dutch earlier than their monolingual peers. Comparing our data to the acquisition pattern found for English-Dutch bilingual children (Unsworth, 2012), we conclude that the direction of influence can also depend on languageinternal properties.
CAER Authors
Dr. Sharon Unsworth
Radboud University - Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Communication and the Department of Modern Languages