Gender Data
Owing to the differences in the gender systems of both languages,
German utterances were analysed for instances of gender marking in obliga-
tory contexts involving only nouns (determiner + noun or adjective + noun),
and Welsh utterances were analysed for instances of gender marking in oblig-
atory context in relation to nouns, adjectives, and pronouns (article + muta-
tion/no mutation or noun + mutated/non-mutated adjective, and use of
gender marked pronouns). Feminine gender in tables and examples is always
denoted by ‘fem.’, masculine by ‘masc.’ and neuter by ‘neut.’.
German
Tables 3.3 and 3.4 show the incidence of determiner use by CP1 and CP2.
There is a stage in which children omit determiners (bare noun stage),
which is then followed by a stage where both bare nouns and nouns with
determiners co-occur (variation stage) (Chierchia et al., 1999; Guasti et al.,
2004). The third stage (called target stage) is characterised by the almost cor-
rect use of determiners in obligatory contexts. Interestingly, it has been
shown that children differ with respect to (i) the emergence of determiners
and (ii) the length of the abovementioned stages according to the language
acquired: in fact, children acquiring a Romance language are said to perform
earlier (in terms of a lower mean length of utterance) and better than those
acquiring a Germanic language. (However, recent studies – e.g. Kupisch &
Bernardini, 2007 – caution against generalisations, since children might
behave differently within one language family, for example, the acquisition
of determiners in Swedish (a north Germanic language) patterned more in
line with Italian (Romance) than German (Germanic) in Italian-Swedish and
Italian-German bilingual children.)
54 Part 2: Bilingual Language Development
Table 3.4 The emergence of determiners by CP2
Age Obligatory contexts (including N) Determiner omitted Determiner realized
2;9,8 31 12 (39%) 19 (61%)
2;10, 18 27 5 (19%) 22 (81%)
2;11,5 23 4 (17%) 19 (83%)Table 3.3 The emergence of determiners by CP1
Age Obligatory contexts (including N) Determiner omitted Determiner realized
2;4,17 53 52 (98%) 1 (2%)
2;6,23 67 55 (82%) 12 (18%)
2;10,27 23 12 (52%) 11 (48%)