those factors that are relevant to our German-Welsh sample, before proceed-
ing to present some pertinent patterns emerging from our new data. The
chapter concludes with an evaluation of the potential contribution of the
new dataset to bilingualism research.
Grammatical Gender
German and Welsh are two languages that operate relatively com-
plex gender systems. In both cases, the gender of a noun cannot be inferred
from the basis of noun form alone, and the assignment of a noun to a par-
ticular gender is often arbitrary (although see Köpcke & Zubin, 1984, and
Szagun et al., 2007, for discussions of the potential regularities of the German
system, and Surridge, 1989, for Welsh). Yet, children acquiring German
seem to do so more quickly than those acquiring Welsh, but more slowly
than children acquiring other Indo-European languages (cf. e.g. Mills, 1986;
Kupisch et al., 2002).
The German-Welsh dataset presented in this chapter (cf. Thomas et al.,
2009) allows us to explore the development of these two systems, side-by-
side, in two bilinguals, receiving German input from their mother and Welsh
input from their father. These data contribute to our understanding of bilin-
gual acquisition of gender as compared with monolingual (or near-monolin-
gual in the case of Welsh) counterparts, and also to our understanding of the
potential influences of one system on the other during development, as
detailed below. The next section provides an overview of the gender systems
of German and Welsh.
The German gender system
German noun gender is marked via agreement patterns between nouns
and articles, attributive adjectives, ordinal numbers, and substantial and
adjectival pronouns (Koehn, 1994). German has definite and indefinite
articles, and three genders – masculine, feminine, and neuter – and gender
is marked only in the singular. Although many researchers have argued
that gender of the noun is relatively unpredictable in German (e.g.
Maratsos, 1982), others have highlighted certain phonological (Köpcke,
1982), morphological (MacWhinney et al., 1989), and even semantic regu-
larities (see, e.g. Zubin & Köpcke, 1986) that can help predict a noun’s
gender. Children are said to make use of some of these regularities in deter-
mining the gender of a noun. However, it remains the case that since most
determiner forms are plurifunctional (Müller, 1994), and since gender,
number and case are confounded, it is difficult to relate gender to distinct
forms in German (Koehn, 1994). For example, in a definite NP the definite
article die can signify both singular feminine and plural in both the
42 Part 2: Bilingual Language Development