Advances in the Study of Bilingualism

determiner forms (in terms of tokens) was very low in comparison to
monolinguals.
The next section outlines the children’s gender marking in Welsh.

Welsh

In general, both children produced fewer utterances during the Welsh ses-
sions (interacting with their fathers) than during the German sessions (inter-
acting with their mothers). This frequency in the production of Welsh
utterances was lower also for the bilinguals than for age-matched (near-)
monolingual Welsh-speaking controls (interacting with a female researcher –
see Jones, 2004). Despite the limited number of gender-marked contexts that
appeared in the Welsh sessions analysed for this chapter, some pertinent pat-
terns were, nevertheless, observed. These patterns are outlined briefly below.

Determiner + Noun
In contrast to what was found in the German data, our bilinguals did not
demonstrate an awareness of a gender system in Welsh at the ages observed.
The use of the definite article, where obligatory, was only starting to appear
in CP1’s data, but was still largely unrealised by CP2 (see Table 3.7).
In contrast to the German data, both CP1 and CP2 tended to omit the
article in obligatory contexts almost exclusively when using Welsh. Whereas
the use of the determiner increased with age in German, any such develop-
ment with age in Welsh was marginal, at best. However, such behavioural
‘delay’ cannot be explained as a consequence of bilingualism per se since
similar behaviours were also observed for the (near-)monolingual Welsh-
speakers. It is more likely that such behaviours are a consequence of the
lower frequency of exposure to marked gender forms in Welsh, owing to the
predominance of masculine forms in the language and inconsistent marking
in adult speech, which may result in slower acquisition.

56 Part 2: Bilingual Language Development

Table 3.7 Correct gender assignment after the defi nite article in Welsh: CP1, CP2, and
(near) monolingual comparisons

Age Obligatory contexts

(including N)

Determiner

omitted

Determiner

realized

CP1 2;6,23 7 6 (86%) 1 (14%)

CP1 2;7,27 5 5 (100%) 0 (0%)

CP1 2;11,6 7 5 (71%) 2 (29%)

CP2 2;7,14 6 6 (100%) 0 (0%)

CP2 2;9,22 5 5 (100%) 0 (0%)

CP2 2;10,28 1 1 (100%) 0 (0%)

Monolingual 1 (2;6,09) 13 12 (92%) 1 (8%)

Monolingual 2 (2;5,21) 44 36 (82%) 8 (18%)