Previous research revealed that monolingual children between 11- and 13-yearold show a target-like production with respect to gender assignment of definite determiners whereas this is not the case for bilingual children who massively overgeneralize de. In order to further investigate this overgeneralization, we designed an experimental decision task, “tapping the knowledge” of both monolingual and bilingual children. Our results show that bilinguals fail to represent abstract gender and that de and het are in free variation. The difference between the production and comprehension data could suggest that bilinguals have some awareness of de and het being gender markers. In that case, the overgeneralization in the production data is possibly not a grammatical phenomenon, but more likely a speech production strategy.
2008. Factors of success and failure in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Second Language Research 24:3 ► pp. 267 ff.
Unsworth, Sharon
2008. Age and input in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch. Second Language Research 24:3 ► pp. 365 ff.
UNSWORTH, SHARON
2013. Assessing the role of current andcumulativeexposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 16:1 ► pp. 86 ff.
Unsworth, Sharon
2013. Assessing Age of Onset Effects in (Early) Child L2 Acquisition. Language Acquisition 20:2 ► pp. 74 ff.
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