In this paper, we test the L2 Status Factor (Bardel & Falk, 2007) by examining to what extent Dut... more In this paper, we test the L2 Status Factor (Bardel & Falk, 2007) by examining to what extent Dutch secondary school students (13–15 years) prefer L2 English over L1 Dutch in L3 French acquisition, and we study the influence of L2 education by comparing an English immersion curriculum vs. a regular Dutch curriculum. We investigate verb placement in declarative root clauses, viz. V-to-T movement, where the finite verb moves to T in French but not in English and V-to-C movement, in which the V2-rule applies in Dutch but not in French. We report data from a Grammaticality Judgement Task. The results indicate that in the immersion group there is significantly more influence from English than from Dutch. In the regular group, the L1 and the L2 are both important sources of transfer.
In: B. Hazdenar & E. Gavruseva (Eds.). Current trends in child second language acquisition. A generative perspective., 2008
Previous research revealed that monolingual children between 11 and 13 years old show a target-li... more Previous research revealed that monolingual children between 11 and 13 years old show a target-like production with respect to gender assignment of definite determiners whereas this is not the case for bilingual children of the same age who massively overgeneralize de. In order to further investigate how to interpret this overgeneralization of de in the production data of bilingual children, we designed an experimental decision taks, "tapping the knowledge" of both monolingual and bilingual children. As for what we expected to find, we formulated three hypotheses.
... The lead-ing idea of recent decades is that children who acquire two languages from birth sep... more ... The lead-ing idea of recent decades is that children who acquire two languages from birth separate their two languages/grammars from very early on (cf. Meisel 1989; Paradis & Genesee 1995; De Houwer 1990 among many others). ...
subject index: bilingual children from ethnic communities, delay, quantity of the input, quality ... more subject index: bilingual children from ethnic communities, delay, quantity of the input, quality of the input, cross-linguistic influence, word order, grammatical gender of the definite determiner, interface phenomenon, sentence completion test, default feature, DO-support, vulnerability, quantitative difference, qualitative difference, fossilization In the following we examine the acquisition of (i) the position of the finite verb in subordinate clauses and (ii) the grammatical gender of the definite determiner in Dutch by means of bilingual children from ethnic minority communities. The experimental results reveal that these children show a delay; they (ultimately) reach the target grammar for word order, whereas this is not so clear with respect to grammatical gender. These differences are explained by showing that these bilingual children are more like L2 than 2L1 acquirers, particularly with respect to the quantity and the quality of the Dutch input they are exposed to.
Dutch nouns are divided into two groups according to grammatical gender which is, among others, m... more Dutch nouns are divided into two groups according to grammatical gender which is, among others, marked on the definite determiner: common nouns take the definite determiner de and neuter nouns take the definite determiner het. This study is unique in systematically investigating the acquisition of grammatical gender and the definite determiner in the production and knowledge data of the same Dutch children. Three groups of children were examined: (i) typically developing monolinguals (L1-TD: 6;7-9;11), (ii) monolinguals with Specific Language Impairment (L1-SLI: 8;4-12;0), and (iii) typically developing bilinguals, who are early second language learners (eL2: 6;7-10;0). The three groups of children reveal different stages in discovering that de and het cover the gender paradigm. At comparable ages, the L1-TD children have completed this paradigm discovery; however, the eL2 children have not yet completed it, and the L1-SLI children are only at the first stage of the discovery of the gender paradigm.
The acquisition of the French DP in a bilingual context Aafke Hulk 1. Introduction Consider the f... more The acquisition of the French DP in a bilingual context Aafke Hulk 1. Introduction Consider the following short dialogue between Anouk, a Dutch/French bilin-gual girl, and her francophone mother: (1) Mother: qu'est-ce que tu vas manger? what you go eat Anouk: pain Anouk 2; ...
Between 2L1-and child L2 acquisition An experimental study of bilingual Dutch* Aafke Hulk and Leo... more Between 2L1-and child L2 acquisition An experimental study of bilingual Dutch* Aafke Hulk and Leonie Cornips University of Amsterdam/Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences In this article we examine the acquisition of (i) the position of the finite verb in subordinate clauses and ...
ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to investigate the contrast in the timing of acquisition of gra... more ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to investigate the contrast in the timing of acquisition of grammatical gender attested in Dutch and Greek child learners. Greek children show precocious acquisition of neuter gender in particular, while Dutch children experience a long delay in the acquisition of neuter nouns, which extends to school age. For both Dutch and Greek, neuter has been claimed to be the default gender value on grounds of syntactic distribution in contexts where gender agreement is inert. To reconcile the contrast between the learner and the language facts in Dutch, as well as the contrast in the timing between Greek and Dutch monolingual child learners, we consider two sets of criteria to define the notion of default: one set pertains to the notion of linguistic default and the other to the notion of learner default. We suggest that, whereas Greek neuter is both the linguistic and the learner default value, Dutch neuter is the linguistic but not the learner default, leading to a learnability problem.
ABSTRACT The traditional account of the Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) predicts that all lang... more ABSTRACT The traditional account of the Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) predicts that all languages that show a DPBE will also reveal a Quantificational Asymmetry (QA). Children's performance on object-pronouns must therefore improve when a QP-subject replaces the NP-subject. These QA results have been obtained in English (modulo methodological differences), but none of the few Dutch studies reliably revealed this effect. We used similar materials to Marinis and Chondrogianni (2011) who used a test that induced both a DBPE and a QA in English; hence, we compared their results (n = 33, 6;0–9;0) to ours (n = 29, 6;3–9;1) on the same task. The comprehension experiment consists of bi-clausal sentences with Noun Phrase (NP) and Quantified Noun Phrase (QP) antecedents and object-pronouns and reflexives. Both Dutch and English children show a DPBE, i.e. they have problems with correctly interpreting object-pronouns, because they frequently accept interpretations in which the object-pronoun is co-identified with the NP-subject. However, only English children's performance reveals a QA, which the Dutch children do not show, as they perform similarly on NP and QP-subjects. Interestingly, a similar contrast is found for object-reflexives: where the English children's performance worsens when a QP-subject replaces the NP-subject, the Dutch children's scores are target-like on both subject types. These contrasts suggest that all children allow locally bound pronouns and reflexives (as suggested by Spenader et al., 2009) and that it is their quantifier reading preferences that determine how the object-pronoun or object-reflexive is understood. We hypothesize that these quantifier readings are language-specific: Dutch children prefer a distributive reading for QPs, which induces a bound pronoun interpretation; English children prefer a collective reading, which forbids a bound pronoun interpretation.
The material that we present in this article is the result of a collaboration that started out wi... more The material that we present in this article is the result of a collaboration that started out with intriguing facts from the fi eld of Dutch child language, showing that children –at a certain stage– have recourse to a default determiner in what seemed to make part of their way towards acquiring grammatical gender. By attempting to get grip on
(1) a. HD/?*SD Het riet buigt zich the reeds bends refl 'the reed is bending' b. HD/SD ... more (1) a. HD/?*SD Het riet buigt zich the reeds bends refl 'the reed is bending' b. HD/SD Hetriet buigt the reed bends 'the reed is bending' ... Interestingly, in French, as is the case in HD, many transitive change of state verbs give rise to both a reflexive and an intransitive counterpart as is ...
In this article we discuss the theoretical implications of an experimental pilot study on the acq... more In this article we discuss the theoretical implications of an experimental pilot study on the acquisition of word order properties in L2 French by Dutch native speakers. We expected the IL of our L2 learners to show the interaction of three parameters: the Head parameter, a (target of) ...
In this paper, we test the L2 Status Factor (Bardel & Falk, 2007) by examining to what extent Dut... more In this paper, we test the L2 Status Factor (Bardel & Falk, 2007) by examining to what extent Dutch secondary school students (13–15 years) prefer L2 English over L1 Dutch in L3 French acquisition, and we study the influence of L2 education by comparing an English immersion curriculum vs. a regular Dutch curriculum. We investigate verb placement in declarative root clauses, viz. V-to-T movement, where the finite verb moves to T in French but not in English and V-to-C movement, in which the V2-rule applies in Dutch but not in French. We report data from a Grammaticality Judgement Task. The results indicate that in the immersion group there is significantly more influence from English than from Dutch. In the regular group, the L1 and the L2 are both important sources of transfer.
In: B. Hazdenar & E. Gavruseva (Eds.). Current trends in child second language acquisition. A generative perspective., 2008
Previous research revealed that monolingual children between 11 and 13 years old show a target-li... more Previous research revealed that monolingual children between 11 and 13 years old show a target-like production with respect to gender assignment of definite determiners whereas this is not the case for bilingual children of the same age who massively overgeneralize de. In order to further investigate how to interpret this overgeneralization of de in the production data of bilingual children, we designed an experimental decision taks, "tapping the knowledge" of both monolingual and bilingual children. As for what we expected to find, we formulated three hypotheses.
... The lead-ing idea of recent decades is that children who acquire two languages from birth sep... more ... The lead-ing idea of recent decades is that children who acquire two languages from birth separate their two languages/grammars from very early on (cf. Meisel 1989; Paradis & Genesee 1995; De Houwer 1990 among many others). ...
subject index: bilingual children from ethnic communities, delay, quantity of the input, quality ... more subject index: bilingual children from ethnic communities, delay, quantity of the input, quality of the input, cross-linguistic influence, word order, grammatical gender of the definite determiner, interface phenomenon, sentence completion test, default feature, DO-support, vulnerability, quantitative difference, qualitative difference, fossilization In the following we examine the acquisition of (i) the position of the finite verb in subordinate clauses and (ii) the grammatical gender of the definite determiner in Dutch by means of bilingual children from ethnic minority communities. The experimental results reveal that these children show a delay; they (ultimately) reach the target grammar for word order, whereas this is not so clear with respect to grammatical gender. These differences are explained by showing that these bilingual children are more like L2 than 2L1 acquirers, particularly with respect to the quantity and the quality of the Dutch input they are exposed to.
Dutch nouns are divided into two groups according to grammatical gender which is, among others, m... more Dutch nouns are divided into two groups according to grammatical gender which is, among others, marked on the definite determiner: common nouns take the definite determiner de and neuter nouns take the definite determiner het. This study is unique in systematically investigating the acquisition of grammatical gender and the definite determiner in the production and knowledge data of the same Dutch children. Three groups of children were examined: (i) typically developing monolinguals (L1-TD: 6;7-9;11), (ii) monolinguals with Specific Language Impairment (L1-SLI: 8;4-12;0), and (iii) typically developing bilinguals, who are early second language learners (eL2: 6;7-10;0). The three groups of children reveal different stages in discovering that de and het cover the gender paradigm. At comparable ages, the L1-TD children have completed this paradigm discovery; however, the eL2 children have not yet completed it, and the L1-SLI children are only at the first stage of the discovery of the gender paradigm.
The acquisition of the French DP in a bilingual context Aafke Hulk 1. Introduction Consider the f... more The acquisition of the French DP in a bilingual context Aafke Hulk 1. Introduction Consider the following short dialogue between Anouk, a Dutch/French bilin-gual girl, and her francophone mother: (1) Mother: qu'est-ce que tu vas manger? what you go eat Anouk: pain Anouk 2; ...
Between 2L1-and child L2 acquisition An experimental study of bilingual Dutch* Aafke Hulk and Leo... more Between 2L1-and child L2 acquisition An experimental study of bilingual Dutch* Aafke Hulk and Leonie Cornips University of Amsterdam/Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences In this article we examine the acquisition of (i) the position of the finite verb in subordinate clauses and ...
ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to investigate the contrast in the timing of acquisition of gra... more ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to investigate the contrast in the timing of acquisition of grammatical gender attested in Dutch and Greek child learners. Greek children show precocious acquisition of neuter gender in particular, while Dutch children experience a long delay in the acquisition of neuter nouns, which extends to school age. For both Dutch and Greek, neuter has been claimed to be the default gender value on grounds of syntactic distribution in contexts where gender agreement is inert. To reconcile the contrast between the learner and the language facts in Dutch, as well as the contrast in the timing between Greek and Dutch monolingual child learners, we consider two sets of criteria to define the notion of default: one set pertains to the notion of linguistic default and the other to the notion of learner default. We suggest that, whereas Greek neuter is both the linguistic and the learner default value, Dutch neuter is the linguistic but not the learner default, leading to a learnability problem.
ABSTRACT The traditional account of the Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) predicts that all lang... more ABSTRACT The traditional account of the Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) predicts that all languages that show a DPBE will also reveal a Quantificational Asymmetry (QA). Children's performance on object-pronouns must therefore improve when a QP-subject replaces the NP-subject. These QA results have been obtained in English (modulo methodological differences), but none of the few Dutch studies reliably revealed this effect. We used similar materials to Marinis and Chondrogianni (2011) who used a test that induced both a DBPE and a QA in English; hence, we compared their results (n = 33, 6;0–9;0) to ours (n = 29, 6;3–9;1) on the same task. The comprehension experiment consists of bi-clausal sentences with Noun Phrase (NP) and Quantified Noun Phrase (QP) antecedents and object-pronouns and reflexives. Both Dutch and English children show a DPBE, i.e. they have problems with correctly interpreting object-pronouns, because they frequently accept interpretations in which the object-pronoun is co-identified with the NP-subject. However, only English children's performance reveals a QA, which the Dutch children do not show, as they perform similarly on NP and QP-subjects. Interestingly, a similar contrast is found for object-reflexives: where the English children's performance worsens when a QP-subject replaces the NP-subject, the Dutch children's scores are target-like on both subject types. These contrasts suggest that all children allow locally bound pronouns and reflexives (as suggested by Spenader et al., 2009) and that it is their quantifier reading preferences that determine how the object-pronoun or object-reflexive is understood. We hypothesize that these quantifier readings are language-specific: Dutch children prefer a distributive reading for QPs, which induces a bound pronoun interpretation; English children prefer a collective reading, which forbids a bound pronoun interpretation.
The material that we present in this article is the result of a collaboration that started out wi... more The material that we present in this article is the result of a collaboration that started out with intriguing facts from the fi eld of Dutch child language, showing that children –at a certain stage– have recourse to a default determiner in what seemed to make part of their way towards acquiring grammatical gender. By attempting to get grip on
(1) a. HD/?*SD Het riet buigt zich the reeds bends refl 'the reed is bending' b. HD/SD ... more (1) a. HD/?*SD Het riet buigt zich the reeds bends refl 'the reed is bending' b. HD/SD Hetriet buigt the reed bends 'the reed is bending' ... Interestingly, in French, as is the case in HD, many transitive change of state verbs give rise to both a reflexive and an intransitive counterpart as is ...
In this article we discuss the theoretical implications of an experimental pilot study on the acq... more In this article we discuss the theoretical implications of an experimental pilot study on the acquisition of word order properties in L2 French by Dutch native speakers. We expected the IL of our L2 learners to show the interaction of three parameters: the Head parameter, a (target of) ...
... Mismatches: Agreement in qualitative construction ... These contrasts are not directly accoun... more ... Mismatches: Agreement in qualitative construction ... These contrasts are not directly accounted for under Kayne's analysis in (6): in both the possessive and the qualitative, the second nominal constituent occupies a specifier position within the DP-internal clausal projection, and ...
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