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The status of the “weaker” language in unbalanced French/German bilingual language acquisition*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

MATTHIAS BONNESEN
MATTHIAS BONNESEN*
Affiliation:
Research Centre of Multilingualism, University of Hamburg
*
Address for correspondence: Research Centre of Multilingualism, University of Hamburg, Max-Brauer-Allee 60, 22765 Hamburg, Germany[email protected]
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Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the status of the so-called “weaker” language, French, in French/German bilingual first language acquisition, using data from two children from the DuFDE-corpus (see Schlyter, 1990a), Christophe and François. Schlyter (1993, 1994) proposes that the “weaker” language in the unbalanced children she studied has the status equivalent to that of a second language (L2). I will verify this assumption on the basis of certain grammatical phenomena, such as the use of subject clitics, null subjects and negation, with respect to which L1 and L2 learners show different developmental patterns. The results indicate that the “weaker” language of the children analyzed in this study cannot be interpreted as an L2. Both children behave predominantly like monolingual and balanced bilingual L1 learners in both languages.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 177 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

*

This study was carried out as part of the research project “Simultaneous and successive acquisition of multilingualism”, directed by Jürgen M. Meisel, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Science Foundation) within the Collaborative Research Center on Multilingualism, established at the University of Hamburg. For their useful comments, I wish to thank Jürgen M. Meisel, Regina Köppe, Noemi Kintana, Susanne Rieckborn, Claudia Stöber and the anonymous reviewers.

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