The Emergence of Nominal Expressions in Spanish-English Early Bilinguals by Ticio Quesada Emma;

Author:Ticio Quesada, Emma; [Ticio Quesada, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2018-11-29T11:46:42+00:00

3.4.3Discussion

The study described in the previous sections has examined the production of different categories of determiners and quantifiers in the spontaneous speech of a large group of early bilingual speakers, contrasting this production with that of two monolingual Spanish speakers. The study’s results were used to document the determiner acquisition process in a Spanish bilingual group, to determine whether monolingual and bilingual child Spanish diverged in this acquisition process and to refute the proposals regarding the acquisition of determiners discussed above.

One of the competing approaches to explaining the cross-linguistic acquisitional difference between Germanic and Romance languages described previously is that offered by Chierchia, Guasti and Gualmini (1999), who, based on the Nominal Mapping Parameter hypothesis (Chierchia, 1998) and the different properties of languages, claim that children in languages such as Spanish achieve the target stage earlier than children acquiring languages such as English because the Spanish learners are able to discern the generalized use of determiners (i.e., all nouns need determiners to be turned into arguments) but that English learners must determine on a case-by-case basis whether the noun is mass or count, which requires a greater level of linguistic sophistication and results in later acquisition of articles. Given the empirical generalization and the explanation provided by the Nominal Mapping Parameter approach, one of the goals of this study was to determine whether the presence of English as the language acquired simultaneously with Spanish produced any divergence in the existence of a bare noun stage in the bilingual group.

The lack of files without determiners for some of the children prevented us from verifying whether bilingual children acquiring Spanish in addition to a Germanic language such as English passed through a phase during which they omit articles in contexts where adults produce them and generalize the use of bare nouns, as occurs in English but not in Spanish. In line with the recent literature, assuming that early acquisition of determiners occurs before 2 years of age, we find that both monolingual controls (Irene at 1;2 and Mendia at 1;8) produce determiners before this mark, and we only have data showing that Yasmin (1;10), Carla (2;0), and Emilio (1;11) did the same before or at 2;0.

Although the rest of the children’s first files are after the 2-year mark, the determiner production seems to be well established in the first files (with an average of 40% production in that group’s first files, ranging from 2;2 to 3;2), which suggests that there were previous files in which these children were using determiners at a lower rate; hence, considering this phenomenon, the age of emergence of these constructions does not appear to be very delayed (that is, there is no indication that the determiners in the first files or the development of determiners was affected by interaction with another language). More importantly, the MLUws displayed by the children in the group show that although their chronological ages are not fully comparable, their MLUws are because only 2 of the 12 children had a MLUw higher than 2 in their first file with determiners available.

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