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Grammatical interference and the acquisition of ergative case in bilingual children learning Basque and Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2007

JENNIFER AUSTIN
JENNIFER AUSTIN
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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Abstract

In this paper I claim that there is evidence of grammatical interference in the development of ergative case in bilingual children acquiring Basque and Spanish. While both monolingual and bilingual children have difficulty acquiring the ergative case in Basque (Barreña, 1995; Ezeizabarrena, 1996), my results indicate that bilingual children omit the ergative case marker to a greater extent than monolingual children. I argue that this difference is the result of interference from Spanish, which takes the form of reinforcing a non-target-like option in Basque (Müller and Hulk, 2001).

Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , November 2007 , pp. 315 - 331
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2007

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Footnotes

Many thanks to the parents, teachers and children who participated in this study in the Basque Country. I also thank Mark Baker, Cassandra Foursha, Barbara Lust, Liliana Sánchez and Gretchen Van de Walle, the audience at the Workshop on Romance Linguistics at Penn State as well as four anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this paper. All errors are my own.