Bilingual and monolingual children's acquisition of Spanish dative alternation structuresorder of acquisition and adult input effects

  1. Silvia Sánchez Calderón
  2. Raquel Fernández Fuertes
Revista:
International journal of bilingual education and bilingualism

ISSN: 1367-0050

Año de publicación: 2020

Volumen: 23

Número: 4

Páginas: 347-367

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2019.1699897 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openUVADOC editor

Otras publicaciones en: International journal of bilingual education and bilingualism

Objetivos de desarrollo sostenible

Resumen

This work investigates the acquisition of Spanish dative alternation (DA) in the production of English-Spanish bilingual and Spanish monolingual children. We explore whether a/para-datives and dative clitic doubled (DCLD) structures are syntactically derived from one another or, whether they are different structures. We also examine whether bilinguals follow similar developmental paths to monolinguals in the acquisition of Spanish DA or whether they differ from their peers given the influence from the syntactic status of English DA in their other language. We conduct an analysis of the spontaneous data from nine English-Spanish bilingual and nine Spanish monolingual children, along with the adults that interact with them, as available in CHILDES database (MacWhinney, B. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. 3rd ed. Hillsdale: Erlbaum. Accessed December 10, 2018. http://childes.talkbank.org). Our results reveal that bilinguals begin to produce DCLDs and a/para-datives at an approximately similar age. This suggests a syntactic underived relationship between the two DA structures, akin to that in monolinguals’ data. Nevertheless significant, the bilinguals and the monolinguals show a delay in the onset and a lower incidence in the production of a/para-datives when compared to DCLDs, which seems to be in line with adult input factors. The monolingual-like patterns in the bilinguals’ data point to a lack of crosslinguistic influence from English DA.