Young children often express possession before they have mastered the linguistic means to express this notion in adult forms. In this paper we present evidence on the acquisition of possessive constructions in bilingual children acquiring a Germanic and a Romance language (i.e. Dutch/French and Dutch/Italian). In a multiple case study, we compare their acquisition with that of monolingual children and suggest that while the stages of acquisition in monolingual and bilingual children are largely the same, the possessive constructions of the bilingual children show signs of cross-linguistic influence. This influence goes mainly from Dutch (the dominant language) to the Romance language, but there are also signs of influence from the Romance language on Dutch. This is in contradiction to earlier claims (Hulk and Mueller 2000, 2001, for example), where influence is predicted to be unidirectional.
2020. The bilingual [dis]advantage. Language and Cognition 12:2 ► pp. 225 ff.
Wu, Chiao-Yi, Beth Ann O’Brien, Suzy J. Styles & Shen-Hsing Annabel Chen
2020. The Impact of Bilingualism on Skills Development and Education. In Transforming Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, ► pp. 47 ff.
BABATSOULI, Elena & Elena NICOLADIS
2019. The acquisition of English possessives by a bilingual child: Do input and usage frequency matter?. Journal of Child Language 46:1 ► pp. 170 ff.
NICOLADIS, ELENA
2012. Cross-linguistic influence in French–English bilingual children's possessive constructions. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15:2 ► pp. 320 ff.
Nicoladis, Elena, Alyssa Rose & Cassandra Foursha-Stevenson
2010. Thinking for speaking and cross-linguistic transfer in preschool bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 13:3 ► pp. 345 ff.
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