Emergence of functional categories in bilingual first language acquisition
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Date
21/07/2000Author
Serratrice, Ludovica
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Abstract
This thesis is a case study on the emergence of functional categories in
bilingual first language acquisition. The investigation focuses on the transition from
one-word to multiword utterances and the shaping of functional projections of
Determiner, Agreement and Tense and their associated formal features.
The empirical basis of this work is a corpus of thirty-nine videorecorded
observations of Carlo, an English-Italian bilingual child, during free-play sessions with
an adult. Data was collected separately for English and Italian for a period of fifteen
months from when the child was 1;10 until he was 3;1, and was then transcribed in
CHAT format.
Four interrelated lines of enquiry inform the analysis presented here. The
principal research question concerns the acquisitional strategies adopted by C. in these
early stages of development in the two languages. A bilingual child is the closest one
can get to a perfect matched pair where a number of variables such as socio-cognitive
development, socio-economic status, parents' education, etc. are eliminated, and the two
main variables to be investigated are the child's two input languages. This is an ideal
situation in which the respective roles of general acquisitional strategies and language particular
ones can be teased apart. An analysis of the emergence of the
morphosyntactic correlates of Determiner, Agreement and Tense categories in English
and Italian reveals a discrepancy between the two languages in the age of acquisition,
rate of acquisition and in the language-specific strategies the child adopts.
The observation of a significant difference in C.'s acquisitional strategies in
English and Italian leads us to the second and third research questions: the way in
which the emergence of functional categories differs between the two languages, and
the reasons why this should be the case. The most obvious difference is the extent to
which morphological correlates of functional categories emerge in the child's speech.
In Italian, verbal and nominal morphology emerges earlier than in English and, at least
in the nominal system, there is evidence that an Agreement category is part of the
child's grammar. In English, verbal morphology is virtually non-existent by the end of the period of observation, and there is no substantial evidence that either Agreement or
Tense are realised. Lexically-specific, item-based learning plays a substantial role in
both languages, but in Italian there is some evidence that a number of grammatical
contrasts are becoming productive by age 3;0, albeit some of them are still limited to a
small number of lexical items.
Two reasons were identified for the observed differences in the emergence of
Determiner, Agreement and Tense in English and Italian: a typological reason, and an
environmental reason. The former concerns the richness of Italian morphology, where
grammatical contrasts are transparently marked both on nominal and verbal paradigms,
as opposed to the relative poverty of English morphology where such contrasts
correlate less obviously ans systematically with morphophonological markers. The
latter reason concerns the very different input conditions in which C. is exposed to
Italian and English: Italian is the home language spoken to him by his family and his
babsysitters, while he is addressed in English by the staff at the nursery where one
adult is in charge of several children and cannot engage in the one-to-one interaction
which is typical of the dyadic situation in which C. finds himself at home.
The differences observed in the lead-lag pattern between C.'s Italian and his
English also provide sufficient evidence to address the fourth research question
concerning the separate developement of the two languages. The analysis of the data
did not reveal any systematic interferences from one language to the other. On the
contrary there is evidence that C. is sensitive to the different morphosyntactic cues of
his two input languages, and that he can treat the two as independent, self-contained
problem spaces.