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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 2:4 (2012) ► pp.379–403

Knowing versus producing

The acquisition of grammatical gender and the definite determiner in Dutch by L1-TD, L1-SLI, and eL2 children

| | Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Universiteit Utrecht
| | Meertens Instituut KNAW Amsterdam, Universiteit Maastricht
|
| | Universiteit van Amsterdam
|

Dutch nouns are divided into two groups according to grammatical gender which is, among others, marked on the definite determiner: common nouns take the definite determiner de and neuter nouns take the definite determiner het. This study is unique in systematically investigating the acquisition of grammatical gender and the definite determiner in the production and knowledge data of the same Dutch children. Three groups of children were examined: (i) typically developing monolinguals (L1-TD: 6;7—9;11), (ii) monolinguals with Specific Language Impairment (L1-SLI: 8;4-12;0), and (iii) typically developing bilinguals, who are early second language learners (eL2: 6;7-10;0). The three groups of children reveal different stages in discovering that de and het cover the gender paradigm. At comparable ages, the L1-TD children have completed this paradigm discovery; however, the eL2 children have not yet completed it, and the L1- SLI children are only at the first stage of the discovery of the gender paradigm.

Keywords: language acquisition, grammatical gender, bilingualism, SLI, production, knowledge
Article outline
  • 1Introduction
  • 2.Participants, design, and methodology
    • 2.1The lexicon task
    • 2.2The Production task
    • 2.3The Knowledge task
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Group results
      • 3.1.1Production task
      • 3.1.2Knowledge task
      • 3.1.3The production and knowledge data compared
      • 3.1.4The seven identical items in the production and knowledge data
    • 3.2Individual Patterns
      • 3.2.1Production task
      • 3.2.2Knowledge task
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 November 2012
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.2.4.02kei
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