Misrepresentation of Dutch neuter gender in older bilingual children?

Susanne Brouwer | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen

Leonie Cornips | Meertens Institute (KNAW), Amsterdam

Aafke Hulk | University of Amsterdam

Previous research revealed that monolingual children between 11- and 13-yearold show a target-like production with respect to gender assignment of definite determiners whereas this is not the case for bilingual children who massively overgeneralize de. In order to further investigate this overgeneralization, we designed an experimental decision task, “tapping the knowledge” of both monolingual and bilingual children. Our results show that bilinguals fail to represent abstract gender and that de and het are in free variation. The difference between the production and comprehension data could suggest that bilinguals have some awareness of de and het being gender markers. In that case, the overgeneralization in the production data is possibly not a grammatical phenomenon, but more likely a speech production strategy.

Published online: 09 July 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.46.06bro

Cited by

Cited by 9 other publications

Blom, Elma & Nada Vasić

2011. The production and processing of determiner–noun agreement in child L2 Dutch. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1:3 ► pp. 265 ff.

Cornips, Leonie & Aafke Hulk

2008. Factors of success and failure in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Second Language Research 24:3 ► pp. 267 ff.

Hinskens, Frans, Roeland van Hout, Pieter Muysken & Ariën van Wijngaarden

2021. Variation and change in grammatical gender marking: the case of Dutch ethnolects. Linguistics 59:1 ► pp. 75 ff.

Keij, Brigitta, Leonie Cornips, Roeland van Hout, Aafke Hulk & Joanne van Emmerik

2012. Knowing versus producing. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 2:4 ► pp. 379 ff.

Tribushinina, Elena, Julia Lomako, Natalia Gagarina, Ekaterina Abrosova & Pim Mak

2020. In Typical and Impaired Processing in Morphosyntax [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 64], ► pp. 153 ff.

Unsworth, Sharon

2008. Age and input in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Second Language Research 24:3 ► pp. 365 ff.

Unsworth, Sharon

2013. Assessing Age of Onset Effects in (Early) Child L2 Acquisition. Language Acquisition 20:2 ► pp. 74 ff.

UNSWORTH, SHARON

2013. Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 16:1 ► pp. 86 ff.

Unsworth, Sharon

2014. In Input and Experience in Bilingual Development [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 13], ► pp. 181 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 march 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.