Acceso usuarios
Indra Sinka, Christina Schelleter
This paper addresses the morphosyntactic development of two bilingual children and the issues raised by the controversy between the single system and the separate development hypotheses. Set within a generative grammar framework, evidence on German/English and Latvian/English is presented from the earliest stages of language development: for the German/English child from 2;0 to 2;6, for the Latvian/English child from 1;3 to 1;11. For the German/English data, the results show early word order patterns which are in line with the language-specific orders of both languages. In the Latvian/English data, there is correct inflectional marking on nouns and verbs in Latvian from the earliest stages, contrary to the paucity of such marking in English. Hence the evidence from both children supports the view that the bilingual child separates the two languages from the beginning (Separate Development Hypothesis). In addition, the data show a developmental lead-lag pattern whereby functional categories emerge first in the more inflected language (German and Latvian) and later in English.
