Advances in the Study of Bilingualism

As mentioned above, for German, it has been observed that children start
to utter articles at around age two (cf. Eisenbeiss, 2000; Kupisch, 2006; Penner
& Weissenborn, 1996), but they do not reach stage three until around age
three (cf. e.g. Szagun et al., 2007). For Welsh, to our knowledge, there are no
existing studies looking at the development of the ‘Variational Model’ pro-
posed by Chierchia et al. (1999) in the acquisition of determiners.
The determiner forms produced by the children in our datasets were
largely used appropriately with respect to gender. As can be seen from Tables
3.5 and 3.6, 88% (21 of 24) of all determiners realized by CP1 and 81%
(52/64) of all determiners realized by CP2 were marked correctly for gender.
With respect to acquisition and development of correct determiners, we
can state that, whereas CP1 seems to have reached the second stage of varia-
tion towards the age of 2;10,27, CP2 is in the second stage in the first two
recordings, but may have reached stage three at age 2;11,5, as stated for
German monolinguals. With respect to gender marking, there were only a
few instances among the children’s utterances. However, CP1 was using the
target gender in 82 − 100% of the cases, while CP2 did so in 77 − 90% of cases.
At the same time, CP2 starts exploring the case system in German by
using the indefinite article einen, correctly marked for accusative, and the
definite article dem, correctly marked for dative, in the second and third of
the analysed sessions. Clearly, an analysis of more occurrences is needed in
order to better understand the patterns emerging from the data, especially
beyond the ages analysed for this chapter.
In general, then, our bilinguals’ linguistic behaviour demonstrated an
emerging knowledge of the gender system in German, but production of

Cross-linguistic Influence and Patterns of Acquisition 55

Table 3.5 Correct and incorrect gender assignment in German in CP1

Age Determiner

realized

Correct

gender

Incorrect

gender

Examples for incorrect gender

2;4,17 1 1 (100%) *eine horn (fem. for masc.) ‘a horn’

2;6,23 12 12 (100%)

2;10,27 11 9 (82%) 2(18%) *meine baby (fem. for neut.)

*mein schule (masc. for fem.)

Table 3.6 Correct and incorrect gender assignment in German in CP2

Age Determiner

realized

Correct gender Incorrect

gender

Examples for incorrect

gender

2;9,8 19/31 (61%) 17/22 (77%) 5/22 (23%) *den brille aufsetzen

(masc. for fem.)

2;10,18 22/27 (81%) 17/22 (77%) 5/22 (23%) *die geld (fem. for neut.)

2;11,5 19/23 (83%) 18/20 (90%) 2/20 (10%) *die junge (fem. for masc.)