Gender acquisition in bilingual children: French–German, Italian–German, Spanish–German and Italian–French

Author:

Eichler Nadine1,Jansen Veronika1,Müller Natascha1

Affiliation:

1. Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany

Abstract

This study compares gender acquisition within determiner phrases between monolingual German children and bilingual children acquiring a Romance language (French, Spanish, Italian) and German or two Romance languages simultaneously. Furthermore, the two languages within the bilingual children are compared to one another with respect to the acquisition of gender. The influence of different factors on gender acquisition is discussed: language dominance, transparency of gender marking and/or reliability of gender cues in the respective languages. It shows that bilingual children can acquire the gender systems in both languages just as monolinguals and that bilingualism per se does not have a delaying effect. In bilingual children, as in monolingual children, German is most problematic in terms of gender acquisition. French represents only slightly more problems than Spanish and Italian, the latter two-gender systems being acquired with ease. Since adult phonological gender rules are characterized by their rather low validity in German and in French, lower accuracy with German gender indicates that the way how gender is marked in the languages influences acquisition more than the validity of gender rules; in German and not in French, gender marking is intertwined with case and number markings. Although our results suggest that gender accuracy depends on the language acquired, some children do not fit into the expected pattern of gender acquisition with respect to the analysed languages. Interestingly, all these children show a language imbalance. Therefore, we claim that the children’s gender accuracy can be predicted on the basis of the language acquired, but language dominance can blur this ranking. Interestingly, it is not the case that gender is delayed in the weak language of the bilingual children; language imbalance has the effect that the child may not tend towards the predicted side of an accuracy ranking (for the weaker language). A further result of this study is that accuracy on neuter gender is lower in bilingual German than in monolingual German, suggesting that the fact that the bilingual children acquire a two-gender system simultaneously with a three-gender system has a delaying effect for target-like neuter marking.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics,Education

Cited by 61 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

同舟云学术

1.学者识别学者识别

2.学术分析学术分析

3.人才评估人才评估

"同舟云学术"是以全球学者为主线,采集、加工和组织学术论文而形成的新型学术文献查询和分析系统,可以对全球学者进行文献检索和人才价值评估。用户可以通过关注某些学科领域的顶尖人物而持续追踪该领域的学科进展和研究前沿。经过近期的数据扩容,当前同舟云学术共收录了国内外主流学术期刊6万余种,收集的期刊论文及会议论文总量共计约1.5亿篇,并以每天添加12000余篇中外论文的速度递增。我们也可以为用户提供个性化、定制化的学者数据。欢迎来电咨询!咨询电话:010-8811{复制后删除}0370

www.globalauthorid.com

TOP

Copyright © 2019-2024 北京同舟云网络信息技术有限公司
京公网安备11010802033243号  京ICP备18003416号-3