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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 29, Nijmegen
Edited by Janine Berns, Haike Jacobs and Dominique Nouveau
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13] 2018
► pp. 143–158

The acquisition of variation

Romance adjective placement in bilingual children

| Bergische Universität Wuppertal

Bilingual children do not have problems with variation across languages, one of the most convincing kind of evidence that they are able to separate their two languages from early on. Natural languages exhibit another kind of variation, namely intra-linguistic variation, as in the case of adjective placement in Romance (French, Spanish). The acquisition of the distribution of adjectives implies a fine analysis of different factors which determine the probability with which an adjective occurs pre- or postnominally. An analysis of 12 German-Romance (French, Spanish) or Romance-Romance (French, Spanish, Italian) bilingual children from birth from the age of 1;4 until the age of 5;4 and 3 adults (Spanish, French) shows that it is important to distinguish between French and Spanish. In French, the children are able to acquire the fine distinctions of the adult systems from early on, both with respect to variation across languages and intra-linguistic variation. The French bilingual data lack any signs of cross-linguistic influence. In contrast, bilingual children with Spanish do not always reflect the input frequencies.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Variation and language acquisition
  • 3.Adjective placement in German, French and Spanish
    • 3.1Current assumptions in literature
    • 3.2Adjective placement in adult speech
      • 3.2.1French adult speech
      • 3.2.2Spanish adult speech
  • 4.Empirical study
    • 4.1Methodology
    • 4.2Bilingual German
    • 4.3Bilingual French
    • 4.4Bilingual Spanish
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.13.10gev
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