Bilingual First Language Acquisition

Bilingual children have shown to separate their two languages very early in development. They succeed without passing through a stage of fusion. Notwithstading, most researchers found evidence for cross-linguistic influence during early stages. Cross-linguistic influence has at least two outcomes: The children may use lexical items of language A when speaking language B or it may use a syntactic/morphological structure of language A when producing language B. A hotly-debated issue in early child bilingualism is the interpretation of the data exhibiting language influence. Genesee (1989) and Meisel (1989), the pioneers for the assumption about early separation, make use of the concept of language dominance. They emphasize that separate development is possible, but that external factors such as language dominance influence the way how adult-like competence is achieved by bilingual children. Other explanations are performance-driven and assume that it is difficult in general, at least during early stages, to process two languages and that adult-like competence is being achieved only via the route of language influence since the proformance system of the child matures and makes processing of two languages more easily available. The course will start with a general introduction into the main concepts like fusion, types of bilingualism and phenomena related to bilingualism, i.e. language influence at the morpho-syntactic level, language mixing and language dominance. In a second step, the kind of evidence for cross-linguistic influence will be studied in more detail linguistically (among these phenomena are word order, the null-subject phenomenon, null objects, determiner omissions, gender marking, copula omissions, case marking). The course will end with possible explanations for an observation which is difficult, if not impossible to account for in terms of competence: the extent of cross-linguistic influence varies from individual to individual. The course will focus on Romance languages, in particular French, Spanish and Italian.