Publications

Publication details [#53936]

Gürel, Ayse and Enisa Mede. 2010. Acquisition of English articles in early bilingualism. EUROSLA Yearbook 10 (1) : 193–219.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/eurosla

Annotation

It has been suggested that child L1 learners overuse the definite article in indefinite contexts due to maturational/pragmatic factors such as egocentricity and an inability to differentiate common ground contexts from speaker beliefs-only contexts (Maratsos 1976; Schaeffer & Matthewson 2005). Knowledge of semantic features such as specificity and definiteness is also implicated in L1 learners' (in)correct article use (Ionin et al. 2004, 2009). In the context of child bilingualism, on the other hand, difficulties in acquisition of articles are expected to be doubled when one of the languages of the child does not have a corresponding article system. To address these issues and to identify parallels between monolingual and bilingual language acquisition, this paper examines the use of English articles by a Serbo-Croatian-English simultaneous bilingual child and two monolingual English-speaking children. The results reveal qualitative and quantitative differences between monolingual and bilingual children's use of English articles, possibly due to the influence of Serbo-Croatian (an article-less language). The findings suggest that in simultaneous child bilingualism, cross-linguistic transfer overrides maturational/pragmatic or semantic factors that are tied to incorrect article use (cf. Zdorenko & Paradis 2008).