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German–English-speaking children's mixed NPs with ‘correct’ agreement*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2010

LIANE JORSCHICK ,
ANTJE ENDESFELDER QUICK ,
DANA GLÄSSER ,
ELENA LIEVEN  and
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
LIANE JORSCHICK
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
ANTJE ENDESFELDER QUICK
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
DANA GLÄSSER
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
ELENA LIEVEN
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
MICHAEL TOMASELLO*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
*
Address for correspondence: Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany[email protected]
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Abstract

Previous research has reported that bilingual children sometimes produce mixed noun phrases with ‘correct’ gender agreement – as in der dog (der being a masculine determiner in German and the German word for “dog”, hund, being masculine as well). However, these could obviously be due to chance or to the indiscriminate use of a default determiner. In the current study, we established with high statistical reliability that each of three German–English bilingual children, of 2–4 years of age, produced such mixed NPs with ‘correct’ agreement at significantly greater than chance levels. Also noteworthy was the fact that all three children produced such NPs with German determiners and English nouns much more frequently than the reverse. These findings provide a solid statistical foundation for further studies into the phenomenon of mixed noun phrases with ‘correct’ gender agreement.

Keywords

child languagemixed utterancesdeterminer phrasesGermanEnglish
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 173 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

The authors would like to thank the families of the children who participated in this study and contributed their time to making this research possible. We also wish to thank the transcribers of the data Melanie Dathe, Katharina Grabs, Johanna Gundermann, Claudia Jorek, Susanna Jorek, Susann Karas, Anja Krökl, Tim Manley, Olaf Mürer, Tobias Rohe, Sebastian Sauppe, Mareike Sera, Henriette Zeidler and Ulrike Zeissler, and the anonymous reviewers who offered helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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