Determiners in bilingual German-Italian children : What they tell us about the relation between language influence and language dominance

Abstract

This study addresses the question of whether language dominance and cross-linguistic influence are related by investigating the acquisition of determiner omission in four bilingual German–Italian children. The study begins by showing that monolingual Italian learners omit determiners less extensively than monolingual German learners. If bilingual children had two autonomous grammatical systems, this contrast should be mirrored in their language acquisition. The analysis suggests the contrary. The bilingual children are compared in terms of language balance and language influence in determiner use. Based on the analysis, I argue that influence is not dependent on language dominance alone. Rather, both language dominance and the properties of the target languages must be taken into account when predicting cross-linguistic influence.