order restrictions for the placement of the main verb in both languages by
the age of 2;10,18.
Conclusion
This chapter aimed to present an initial picture of the emergent gram-
mars of two children acquiring an interesting and relatively rare pair of lan-
guages – German and Welsh – simultaneously from birth. The analysis
looked in particular at their acquisition of two linguistics constructs in both
languages – that of grammatical gender and word order – with an aim to
highlight potential carry-over effects from one language to the other during
the acquisition process. Although the data set selected for this chapter was
limited, covering three sessions in each language per child, the patterns that
emerged among the data revealed some interesting trends that warrant fur-
ther investigation among the complete dataset. These patterns, and their
potential relevance to theories of cross-linguistic influence, are discussed
briefly below:
First, although there were no major influences of one language on the
other with respect to gender acquisition (hence, no ‘deep’ transfer of the
gender category per se – cf. Gathercole, 2007), our bilinguals did appear to
sustain a longer period of bare nouns than is typically found among mono-
lingual age-matched peers, as expressed in the Variational Model (Chierchia
et al., 1999). It may well be that when both systems are complex, even for
monolinguals to master, cross-linguistic influence in the form of systemic
transfer may not occur, although such combination of complex structures in
two typologically very different languages may be susceptible to some form
of delay in development. Further analysis of the data beyond age 3 will help
illuminate these issues.
Second, although both children were simultaneous bilinguals, their
German input was provided by their mothers, their Welsh input provided by
their fathers. As it was typical for these children to spend more time with
their mothers, this may explain the faster progression with respect to gender
marking in German than in Welsh. However, this earlier development in
German does nothing to ‘bolster’ development in Welsh, nor does the seem-
ingly less complex determiner system of Welsh serve to ‘bolster’ their acquisi-
tion of the determiner system in German. Moreover, given the relative
inconsistency of gender marking in adult speech (see, e.g. Jones, 1998;
Thomas, 2001; Thomas & Gathercole, 2005), along with the bias towards
greater numbers of masculine than feminine nouns in Welsh, the children’s
exposure to the marked form in Welsh is reduced further. Such extra-linguistic
issues will have important consequences on bilinguals’ acquisition of com-
plex structures and may influence the extent to which one can rely on their
developing knowledge of a system in one language when aiming to use the
Cross-linguistic Influence and Patterns of Acquisition 61