30 november 2010

Afsluitend colloquium Internationaal NWO-project Early Child Bilingualism: Bilingual first language acquisition or child second language acquisition?
plaats: Meertens Instituut, Symposiumzaal
tijd: 14.30 – 17.00 uur

On 30 November a mini-colloquium will be organized to mark the end of the  project Early Child Bilingualism:  Bilingual first language acquisition or child second language acquisition? that is part of the international NWO-program ‘Language Acquisition and Multilingualism’. The lectures will be given by Froso Argyri & Ianthi Tsimpli, Theodoris Marinis, Antonella Sorace, and Sharon Unsworth.

When: Tuesday 30 November 2010

Time: 2.30 – 5.00 pm + drinks afterwards

Location: Meertens Instituut: Symposiumzaal

Program:

2.30 – 3.00 p.m.            Froso Argyri and Ianthi Tsimpli                                
3.00 – 3.30 p.m.            Sharon Unsworth
3.30 – 4.00 p.m.            break
4.00 – 4.30 p.m.            Theodoris Marinis
4.30 – 5.00 p.m.            Antonella Sorace

Froso Argyri and Ianthi Tsimpli

The University of Edinburgh & Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Bilingual acquisition of Greek Gender and Voice: morphology in the sound and the (lexical) meaning interfaces

We report on production data on gender and voice in English-Greek simultaneous, early and late successive bilingual children. The motivation is twofold. Developmentally, monolingual Greek children acquire gender attribution and agreement earlier than (non-active) voice marking. Syntactically, gender is an (uninterpretable) intrinsic feature of the Noun’s entry triggering agreement with Det and Adj while the voice morpheme is an interpretable feature affecting the verb’s transitivity. Although both features affect the computation and have a phonological realisation, gender has no effect on the semantic interface while voice directly affects the (internal) lexicon-syntax interface.            

The findings are summarised as follows: a) bilingual gender production data show differences between simultaneous and successive bilinguals while voice production data don’t; b) accuracy in voice production is higher than in gender production; c) L1 children don’t differ from 2L1 in gender production accuracy but do in voice production.   

Sharon Unsworth

Utrecht University/Meertens Instituut

Assessing the role of input quantity and quality in bilingual acquisition

Considerable individual variation exists amongst simultaneous and sequential bilingual children in terms of their rate and patterns of linguistic development and the amount and type of exposure they receive. This paper reports on a comprehensive assessment of different exposure variables and their impact on the linguistic development of English/Dutch bilingual children.  

Theodoris Marinis

University of Reading

Production of gender and processing of gender mismatch in Dutch and Greek sequential bilingual children

In this talk we will present preliminary data on the production and processing of gender in 6-to-9 year old sequential bilingual children with Turkish as their first language (L1) and Dutch or Greek as their second language (L2) compared to monolingual controls. This is part of a large project investigating production and processing in sequential bilingual children compared to monolingual children with and without Specific Language Impairment.

The L1 and L2 children participated in production tasks investigating gender assignment and in self-paced listening tasks investigating the children’s sensitivity to gender mismatch between the determiner and the noun. The results showed important differences between L1 and L2 children in both languages, but also cross-linguistic differences between Dutch and Greek in gender assignment, and also in the sensitivity of gender mismatch between determiner and noun. The cross-linguistic differences between Dutch and Greek will be discussed in relation to the properties of the gender system in the two languages.

Antonella Sorace

The University of Edinburgh

Input and age in early bilingualism: linguistic approaches in an interdisciplinary framework

The Early Child Bilingualism project has revealed important interactions among factors such as age of onset of bilingualism in childhood, quality versus quantity of input, cross-linguistic influence, structural characteristics of particular linguistic phenomena, and type of interface conditions. I will outline how combining insights from theoretical linguistics and models of general cognition may allow us to better explore these interactions.

Information: Leonie Cornips , leonie.cornips@meertens.knaw.nl