Bilingual First Language Acquisition: French and German grammatical development

288 Pages·1994·22.62 MB·English

by  Jürgen M. Meisel

BILINGUAL FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION & LANGUAGE DISORDERS
EDITORS
Harald Clahsen William Rutherford
University of Essex University of Southern California
EDITORIAL BOARD
Melissa Bowerman (Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen)
Patricia Clancy (University of California at Santa Barbara)
Werner Deutsch (Universität Braunschweig)
Kenji Hakuta (Stanford University)
Kenneth Hyltenstam (University of Stockholm)
Peter Jordens (Free University, Amsterdam)
Barry McLaughlin (University of California at Santa Cruz)
Jürgen M. Meisel (Universität Hamburg)
Anne Mills (University of Amsterdam)
Csaba Pleh (University of Budapest)
Michael Sharwood Smith (University of Utrecht)
Catherine Snow (Harvard University)
Jürgen Weissenborn (Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen)
Lydia White (McGill University)
Helmut Zobl (Carleton University, Ottawa)
Volume 7
Jürgen M. Meisel
Bilingual First Language Acquisition
BILINGUAL
FIRST LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
FRENCH AND GERMAN
GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT
JÜRGEN M. MEISEL
University of Hamburg
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bilingual first language acquisition : French and German grammatical development /
edited by Jürgen Meisel.
p. cm. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, issn 0925-0123 ; v. 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Language acquisition. 2. Bilingualism in children. 3. French language--Acquisition.
4. German language--Acquisition. 5. Grammar, Comparative and general.
I. Meisel, Jürgen M. II. DUFDE (Research Group) III. Series.
P118.B53 1994
401’.93-dc20 94023215
isbn 978 90 272 2470 5 (EUR)/ 978 1 55619 242 5 (US) (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 2471 2 (EUR)/ 978 1 55619 243 2 (US) (Pb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 8497 6 (Eb)
© 1994 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Contents
Preface 1
Jürgen M. Meisel
Acquiring German and French in a Bilingual Setting 3
Peter Jordens
The DUFDE Project 15
Regina Köppe
The Acquisition of Gender and Number Morphology within NP 29
Caroline Koehn
Gender and Number Agreement within DP 53
Natascha Müller
Getting FAT: Finiteness, Agreement and Tense in Early Grammars 89
Jürgen M. Meisel
More about INFL-ection and Agreement: The Acquisition of
Clitic Pronouns in French 131
Georg Kaiser
Case Assignment and Functional Categories in Bilingual Children:
Routes of Development and Implications for Linguistic Theory 161
Achim Stenzel
NP-Movement and Subject Raising 209
Regina Köppe
Parameters Cannot be Reset: Evidence from the Development of COMP 235
Natascha Müller
Index of Names 271
Index of Subjects 277

Preface
On the Initial States of Language Acquisition
Jürgen M. Meisel
University of Hamburg
The contributions to this volume represent the major part of the results obtained
over the last three years in a research project studying the grammatical
development of bilingual children who are acquiring two first languages
simultaneously, French and German. It is the second volume published by the
members of the research team DUFDE; the first appeared as J. M. Meisel (ed.)
(1990). Two First Languages - Early Grammatical Development in Bilingual
Children (= Studies on Language Acquisition, 10). Dordrecht: Foris.
The DUFDE research group (Deutsch und Französisch - Doppelter
Erstspracherwerb/German and French - Simultaneous First Language
Acquisition) has been operating at the University of Hamburg since 1980. From
1986 until 1992, it was generously supported by a research grant from the DFG
(Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) to the author of these lines. We have also
benefitted from material assistance from the University of Hamburg. This
support, both from the DFG and from the University, is hereby gratefully
acknowledged.
A number of individuals have also been most helpful. In fact, without them
the authors of the following chapters would not have been able to do their work,
and we therefore want to thank them sincerely. This is addressed, first of all, to
the children whose language development we have been studying and to their
parents. I gladly repeat what I have said before, namely that knowing them has
been a most rewarding experience for us. Nobody who has not lived through this
experience can imagine the kind of inconvenience it represents in the daily life
of a family to have two people with video equipment invading their homes every
second week for four, five, and more years. We can only hope that our work will
2 JÜRGEN MEISEL
turn out to be useful for other bilingual families — and perhaps even for those
who we studied. Merci infiniment.
Berthold Crysmann, Axel Mahlau, Gesche Seemann, and Martina Wulf have
contributed to the studies published in this volume by helping in analyzing the
data and by discussing the results with us. Without the help of Thomas Westphal,
computers would not only be those mysterious beings which they are, they would
even be frightening. Thanks to all of them. We are especially grateful to Susanne
E. Carroll, Peter Jordens, Tom Roeper, and the anonymous readers recruited by
the series editors for reading and commenting on earlier versions of the chapters
in this volume.
Let me finally mention that all authors are or have been affiliated with the
University of Hamburg and the research group DUFDE, except Peter Jordens
(Free University, Amsterdam) who accepted our invitation to introduce us to the
reader. I want to thank him and all other contributors for their cooperation.
Jürgen M. Meisel
Universität Hamburg
Romanisches Seminar
Acquiring German and French in a Bilingual Setting
Peter Jordens
Free University Amsterdam
The DUFDE-project on the simultaneous acquisition of German and French
as first languages was carried out between 1986 and 1992 under the supervision
of Dr. Jürgen M. Meisel. The acronym DUFDE stands for Deutsch und
Französisch Doppelter Erstspracherwerb (German and French — Simultaneous
Acquisition of Two First Languages). In the present volume, acquisition data
from five children were analyzed: Caroline (1;06,26 - 4;01,06), Pierre (2;03,16
- 4;07,11), Ivar (1;10,12 - 3;04,23), Annika (1;10,18 - 4;05,09) and Pascal
(1;08,22 - 3;04,14). These children grew up in families in which French was the
native language of the mother, and accordingly prominent for those largely in the
care of their mothers during the day, and German the native language of the
father. In the course of the children's development the linguistic situation
changes somewhat. As social relations beyond the family come into play, the role
of German becomes more important. The details on data collection, transcription,
computation of MLU, and coding conventions are given in the introduction by
Regina Köppe. In the following, I would like to point out some of the highlights
of this study which touches upon many of the main issues in first language
acquisition research today.
The structure of the mental lexicon is relevant to the acquisition of plural
morphology and gender attribution. In The acquisition of gender and number
morphology within NP, Caroline Koehn provides evidence for a representation
in terms of schema theory. Within this model, both simple and complex forms
are represented independently in the lexicon. Classes of words are established
through lexical connections based on shared semantic and phonological
properties. The identification of specific phonological features for particular
morphological classes, such as singular or plural, provides evidence that schemas
4 PETER JORDENS
play a major role in the organization of the mental lexicon. The internal structure
of the lexicon is accounted for through the relations between the schemas that
particular items belong to.
In her analysis of plural formation and gender attribution in Ivar (1;5 - 5;0),
Koehn provides evidence for the adequacy of schema theory. In the acquisition
of plural formation in German and French, there is first a stage (from 2;2 to 2;6)
in which Ivar uses deux and zwei without number marking on the noun, as in
zwei kind, to refer to two or more objects and ein and un with nouns to refer to
single objects.
Evidence for the functioning of schemas in the acquisition of the grammati­
cal notions of number and gender can be found in Ivar from 2;7 to 5;0. In
French, Ivar learns the plural and singular forms of the article system before
number distinctions on nouns. In German, on the other hand, number marking
is learned first with nouns. With respect to number marking on nouns, there are
two stages to be discriminated. First, there is a stage in which the plural and
singular forms themselves are produced correctly but often used incorrectly:
plural forms are used with singular reference while singular forms are used with
plural reference. At this stage, the child appears to use particular schemas.
Depending on the cue strengths for plural which are based on saliency,
frequency, and reliability, the child discriminates between allomorphs that are
more or less typical of plural morphology. See Table 1.
Table 1. Plural nouns - errors in reference
prototypical plural forms errors in reference:
plural nouns with single
reference and single nouns
with plural reference
polysyllabic -s Autos 0
polysyllabic -en Katzen 15,4
polysyllabic -e Füße/Schuhe 18,2
polysyllabic -er Kinder/Räder 33,3
umlaut Mütter 50%
Then, from 3;5, allomorphs that were determined as plural forms are
overextended. In nouns such as tischen, keksen, tigern, büchern, fwschen,
schuhen, händen -en is overgeneralized. Overgeneralization of -s only occurs