Acquisition of Word Order in German and Welsh
German
Children’s acquisition of German word order has been well explored (cf.
Clahsen, 1982, 1986; Poeppel & Wexler, 1993; Rothweiler, 1993; Tracy, 1991;
among many others). All studies have observed that children start (during
the age span of approx. 18 to 24 months) with uttering infinite verbs in
clause-final position in declarative sentences, which is not allowed in the
target language (milch trinken ‘milk drink(inf)’). However, by doing so they
demonstrate that they have identified the so called ‘right bracket’ (verb end
position) in the German sentence pattern (cf. Tracy, 2007). As soon as chil-
dren start to inflect verbs, these appear in V2 position (sie trinkt milch ‘she
drinks milk’).
Welsh
Although a number of studies have explored children’s acquisition of
gender, fewer studies have focused primarily on children’s acquisition of
word order patterns in Welsh. Price (1968) (cited in McLaughlin, 1978)
observed classroom discourse among L2 learners of Welsh, and found that
their noun-adjective and noun-possessive constructions in Welsh followed
the expected patterns of Welsh and were not influenced by the contrasting
orders in English. However, a more recent study looking at children’s inter-
pretation of sentential subjects vs. objects showed that differences in word
order patters seem to influence children’s interpretation of sentential argu-
ments (Gathercole et al., 2005). Sentences involving verb-noun-noun con-
structions (mirroring the possible VSO word order pattern of Welsh) were
interpreted as having the first noun as the subject, especially among children
from Welsh-speaking homes. Sentences involving a noun-verb-noun con-
struction (mirroring the dominant SVO word order of English or the (aux)
SVO of Welsh) were interpreted as having the first noun as subject, especially
among younger children (age 5) from mixed Welsh-and English-speaking
homes attending bilingual schools. These results are indicative of cross-lin-
guistic transfer or acceleration among simultaneous bilingual children when
the two structures overlap.
Summary: Word order
More is known about children’s acquisition of word order in German
than in Welsh. What is known is that German speakers acquire the system
early, once they acquire verb inflections, whereas Welsh speakers’ knowledge
reflect their exposure patterns to the language, and may be influenced by
English when learning Welsh and English simultaneously from birth.
48 Part 2: Bilingual Language Development