Cross-linguistic influences in the acquisition of grammatical gender? (original) (raw)

Grammatical gender is claimed to be easily acquired in Romance languages, especially in Italian and Spanish. This can be observed in the early manifestations of gender agreement and in the low rate of agreement errors. In contrast, German gender is acquired relatively late, and children make more errors. Previous studies with data from our project have shown that, despite the easy acquisition of the Spanish gender system, bilinguals differ from monolinguals. Fillers and protoarticles are less frequent in the Spanish bilingual utterances; this concerns the first utterances until the age of around 2 years (Lleó 2003, Kuchenbrandt 2005). The lower frequency of nouns with (proto-)determiners can be attributed to the delayed acquisition of the required prosodic structures, which is independently attested in the bilingual Spanish data (Lleó 2002). In this study, we want to contrast the two languages, and we will address the question whether we find a Spanish influence on German as well. Following Kupisch (2006), the acquisition of Romance determiners by a bilingual may bootstrap the acquisition of determiners in his Germanic language, leading to an earlier convergence to the target system. In previous research, no difference has been found between monolinguals and bilinguals with respect to the acquisition of higher prosodic domains and the development of (proto-)articles in German (Lleó 2002). However, we have not yet focused directly on the development of determiners. This study shows a slight accelerating effect in bilingual German.