The Acquisition of French Determiners by Bilingual Children: A Prosodic Account

Abstract

The present longitudinal study investigates the acquisition of determiners (articles) in two simultaneously bilingual French-Italian children aged 1;6,12 until 3;5,17, one of them being French-dominant and the other one being Italian-dominant. Although French and Italian determiners and determiner phrases share some syntactic aspects, they largely differ with respect to noun length and lexical stress in the nominal domain. Prosody is expected to be a decisive factor in the early prosodification of determiners by French-Italian bilinguals. The analysis of more than 4500 noun phrases yields different acquisition paths and cross-linguistic transfer, which can neither be explained by linguistic structure nor by language balance alone. The results are analyzed within the generative framework. The proposed account integrates language-internal and external factors for determiner acquisition in French by bilingual children.