Title
Tanja Kupisch (University of Calgary): Nominal Mapping in bilingual first language acquisition

CASTL colloquium

Date:  16.11.2006

Time:  19:15

Venue:  E010 1

Description
This talk is concerned with the development of determiners in bilingual children acquiring German simultaneously with French or Italian. It is well known that small children omit determiners from their speech, producing utterances such as “I want cat” instead of “I want the/a cat”. Yet, the extent to which they do so varies cross-linguistically: Children acquiring a Germanic language show higher rates and longer periods of omission than children acquiring a Romance language (Chierchia et al. 1999, Lléo & Demuth 1999). Chierchia et al. (1999) capture this variation in terms of the Nominal Mapping Parameter. Accordingly, “Germanic” and “Romance” are representative of different parametric settings, and “Romance”-learning children converge on their target-setting at earlier ages than “Germanic”-learning children. The NMP makes interesting predictions for bilingual children acquiring a Romance and a Germanic language simultaneously. The currently dominant view in research on bilingualism, the Automony Hypothesis, claims that bilingual children separate their grammars from early on (e.g. Genesee 1989, Meisel 1989). Hence, bilingual children acquiring one language of each parametric type (“Romance” vs. “Germanic”) should converge on the target-setting at different points in their development. Comparing determiner use in the bilingual children’s two languages to each other and to monolingual data, I show that bilinguals acquiring German use determiners more often in obligatory contexts than their monolingual peers. I propose that the simultaneous exposure to the Romance has a positive effect and accelerates the acquisition of German determiners. The study implies that contact phenomena, such as cross-linguistic influence, should not be viewed as negative transfer.

References
Chierchia, G., M. T. Guasti & A. Gualmini. 1999. Nouns and articles in child grammar and the syntax/ semantics map. Presentation at GALA 1999, Potsdam.
Genesee, F. 1989. Early bilingual development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language 16. 161-179.
Lleó, C. & K. Demuth. 1999. Prosodic constraints on the emergence of grammatical morphemes: Cross-linguistic evidence from Germanic and Romance languages. In A. Greenhill, H. Littlefield & C. Tano (eds) Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Boston University Conference on Child Language Development, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 407-418.
Meisel, J. M. 1989. Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In K. Hyltenstam & L. K. Obler (eds) Bilingualism across the Lifespan: Aspects of Acquisition, Maturity and Loss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 13-40.