Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T00:17:56.277Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

German–English-speaking children's mixed NPs with ‘correct’ agreement*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2010

LIANE JORSCHICK ,
ANTJE ENDESFELDER QUICK ,
DANA GLÄSSER ,
ELENA LIEVEN  and
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
LIANE JORSCHICK
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
ANTJE ENDESFELDER QUICK
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
DANA GLÄSSER
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
ELENA LIEVEN
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
MICHAEL TOMASELLO*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
*
Address for correspondence: Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germanytomasello@eva.mpg.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Previous research has reported that bilingual children sometimes produce mixed noun phrases with ‘correct’ gender agreement – as in der dog (der being a masculine determiner in German and the German word for “dog”, hund, being masculine as well). However, these could obviously be due to chance or to the indiscriminate use of a default determiner. In the current study, we established with high statistical reliability that each of three German–English bilingual children, of 2–4 years of age, produced such mixed NPs with ‘correct’ agreement at significantly greater than chance levels. Also noteworthy was the fact that all three children produced such NPs with German determiners and English nouns much more frequently than the reverse. These findings provide a solid statistical foundation for further studies into the phenomenon of mixed noun phrases with ‘correct’ gender agreement.

Keywords

child languagemixed utterancesdeterminer phrasesGermanEnglish
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 173 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The authors would like to thank the families of the children who participated in this study and contributed their time to making this research possible. We also wish to thank the transcribers of the data Melanie Dathe, Katharina Grabs, Johanna Gundermann, Claudia Jorek, Susanna Jorek, Susann Karas, Anja Krökl, Tim Manley, Olaf Mürer, Tobias Rohe, Sebastian Sauppe, Mareike Sera, Henriette Zeidler and Ulrike Zeissler, and the anonymous reviewers who offered helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

References

Bernardini, P., & Schlyter, S. (2004). Growing syntactic structure and code-mixing in the weaker language: The Ivy Hypothesis. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7 (1), 49–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blom, J.-P., & Gumperz, J. J. (1972). Social meaning in linguistic structure: Code-switching in Norway. In Gumperz, J. J. & Hymes, D. (eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics, pp. 407–434. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Cantone, K. F., & Müller, F. (2008). Un Nase or una Nase? What gender marking within switched DPs reveals about the architecture of the bilingual language faculty. Lingua, 118 (6), 810–826.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deuchar, M., & Quay, S. (1999). Language choice in the earliest utterances: A case study with methodological implications. Journal of Child Language, 26, 461–475.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Di Sciullo, A.-M., Muysken, P., & Singh, R. (1986). Government and code-mixing. Journal of Linguistics, 22, 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Döpke, S. (1998). Competing language structures: The acquisition of verb placement by bilingual German–English children. Journal of Child Language, 25, 555–584.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Genesee, F. (1989). Early bilingual development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language, 16, 161–179.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Genesee, F., Nicoladis, E., & Paradis, J. (1995). Language differentiation in early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language, 22, 611–631.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grosjean, F. (1998). Studying bilinguals: Methodological and conceptual issues. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1 (2), 131–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, F. (2001). The bilingual's language modes. In Nicol (ed.), pp. 1–20.Google Scholar
Köppe, R., & Meisel, J. M. (1995). Code-switching in bilingual first language acquisition. In Milroy, L. & Muysken, P. (eds.), One speaker, two languages: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on code-switching, pp. 276–301. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kupisch, T. (2008). Dominance, mixing and cross-linguistic influence: On their relation in bilingual development. In Guijarro-Fuentes, P., Larrañaga, M. P. & Clibbens, J. (eds.), First language scquisition of morphology and syntax, pp. 209–234. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lanza, E. (1992). Can bilingual two-year-olds code-switch? Journal of Child Language, 19, 633–658.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liceras, J. M., Fernández Fuertes, R., Perales, S., Pérez-Tattam, R., & Spradlin, K. T. (2008). Gender and gender agreement in bilingual native and non-native grammars: A view from child and adult functional–lexical mixings. Lingua, 118, 827–851.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liceras, J. M., Spradlin, K. T., & Fernández Fuertes, R. (2005). Bilingual early functional–lexical mixing and the activation of formal features. International Journal of Bilingualism, 2 (9), 227–252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindholm, K. J., & Padilla, A. M. (1978). Language mixing in bilingual children. Journal of Child Language, 5, 327–335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacSwan, J. (1999). A minimalist approach to intrasentential code switching. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (1995). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Mathiot, M. (1979). Sex roles as revealed through referential gender in American English. In Mathiot, M. (ed.), Ethnolinguistics: Boaz, Sapir and Whorf revisited, pp. 1–47. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (1994). Code-switching in young bilingual children: The acquisition of grammatical constraints. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 413–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (2007). On autonomous syntactic development in multiple first language acquisition. In Caunt-Nulton, H., Kulatilake, S. & Woo, I.-H. (eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Boston University Conference on Language Development (vol. 1), pp. 26–45. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Mills, A. E. (1986). The acquisition of gender: A study of English and German. Berlin: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, N. (1998). Transfer in bilingual first language acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 151–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, N., & Hulk, A. (2001). Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myers-Scotton, C. (1997). Duelling languages: Grammatical structure in code-switching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, C. (2002). Contact linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myers-Scotton, C., & Jake, J. L. (2001). Explaining aspects of code-switching and their implications. In Nicol (ed.), pp. 84–116.Google Scholar
Nicol, J. L. (ed.) (2001). One mind, two languages: Bilingual language processing. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Petersen, J. (1988). Word-internal code-switching constraints in a bilingual child's grammar. Linguistics, 26, 479–493.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, S. (1980). “Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAŇOL”: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18, 581–618.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Radford, A., Kupisch, T., Köppe, R., & Azzaro, G. (2007). Concord, convergence and accommodation in bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10 (3), 239–256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szagun, G. (2004). Learning by ear: On the acquisition of case and gender marking by German-speaking children with cochlear implants and with normal hearing. Journal of Child Language, 31, 1–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Szagun, G., Stumper, B., Sondag, N., & Franik, M. (2007). The acquisition of gender marking by young German-speaking children: Evidence for learning guided by phonological regularities. Journal of Child Language, 34, 445–471.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tomasello, M., & Stahl, D. (2004). Sampling children's spontaneous speech: How much is enough? Journal of Child Language, 31, 101–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trask, R. L. (1993). A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M. (1985). Language differentiation by the bilingual infant. Journal of Child Language, 12, 297–324.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Woolford, E. (1983). Bilingual code-switching and syntactic theory. Linguistic Inquiry, 14, 520–536.Google Scholar
Yip, V., & Matthews, S. (2000). Syntactic transfer in a Cantonese–English bilingual child. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3 (3), 193–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar