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Crosslinguistic influence in the discovery of gender: the case of Greek–Dutch bilingual children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2017

EVELYN EGGER ,
AAFKE HULK  and
IANTHI MARIA TSIMPLI
EVELYN EGGER
Affiliation:
University of Reading
AAFKE HULK
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
IANTHI MARIA TSIMPLI*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
*
Address for correspondence: Professor Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, 9 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DPimt20@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

This study investigates the acquisition of grammatical gender in both languages of 21 simultaneous Greek–Dutch bilingual children living in the Netherlands. Greek and Dutch stand on the two opposite sides in terms of frequency and transparency of gender cues. Consequently, monolingual acquisition of gender in Greek is precocious with few overgeneralizations of the default value, neuter, in early stages. In contrast, monolingual acquisition of gender in Dutch is very late with errors in neuter nouns persisting up to the age of 7. Simultaneous Greek–Dutch bilingual children present an interesting test case of crosslinguistic influence in the form of acceleration (Greek affecting Dutch) or delay (Dutch affecting Greek). Children were tested on gender marking on determiners and adjectives in production and grammaticality judgment tasks. Input measures of Greek and Dutch and lexical skills were also considered. Results point to crosslinguistic influence in the form of acceleration of gender discovery in Dutch.

Keywords

gender discoverycrosslinguistic influencesimultaneous bilinguals
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 21 , Special Issue 4: Recent developments in child bilingualism: Cross-linguistic influence, incomplete acquisition, critical periods and the advantages of bilingualism , August 2018 , pp. 694 - 709
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*We thank Irini Toufexes and Athina Ntalli for helping with the data collection and the Greek School Athena in Amsterdam for their collaboration and support. Special thanks go to the participating children and their parents who made this research possible.

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