Reviewed by Carolin Patzelt, University of Hamburg
Two questions take precedence in the field of bilingual language acquisition: first, whether or not children are capable of separating languages, and second, what role language dominance plays. Here, Tanja Kupisch explores both of these questions in her study of the development of determiners in eight bilingual children. Her primary goal is to gain insight into the interplay of language influence and language dominance. Prenominal determiners are ideal for testing this issue because they constitute a grammatical domain in which German and Romance languages differ.
In Ch. 1, ‘Approaches to the study of child language acquisition’ (12–32), K introduces the theoretical models that will be tested. Ch. 2, ‘Language influence, language separation and language dominance’ (33–47), is an overview of previous research. Crucially, K stresses that there can be language influence despite separation. Ch. 3, ‘The bilingual database’ (48–55), details the database and the language balance of the bilingual children.
In Ch. 4, ‘The forms and the distribution of determiners in French, German and Italian’ (56–75), K compares determiner use in French, Italian, and German and explains why determiner acquisition is more difficult in German than in Romance languages. In Ch. 5, ‘The syntactic representation of noun phrases’ (76–99), K discusses two competing models, the uniformity hypothesis and the variability hypothesis, arguing in favor of the variability hypothesis. She presents Thomas Roeper’s model of semantically motivated nodes in the noun phrase, which assumes that children build a syntactic tree from the bottom up: they start from the least specific type of noun phrase (i.e. a bare noun) and progress toward the most specific (i.e. a determiner phrase). K suggests that acquisition data may be useful to test Roeper’s theoretical proposal.
After a presentation of the literature on determiner omission in language acquisition (Ch. 6), K explores longitudinal data in Ch. 7, ‘Bare nouns in bilingual children acquiring French, German and Italian’ (123–45). She demonstrates that although the languages of bilingual children may influence each other, this influence cannot be attributed to language dominance alone. Rather, the combination of languages plays a decisive role.
Ch. 8, ‘Determiner functions in previous acquisition studies’ (146–56), presents an overview of the literature on semantic and pragmatic distinctions encoded by determiners. Early on, determiners appear to be used for deictic and naming functions as well as to express specificity.
In Ch. 9, ‘Article functions in two bilingual children acquiring German and French/Italian’ (157–205), K concludes that, contrary to what previous studies suggest, semantic and pragmatic distinctions develop very early in children. Syntactic acquisition is completed more abruptly than semantic acquisition, and no correlation between language dominance and language influence can be found. Finally, K suggests a modification of Roeper’s model on the basis of her results.
Based on a large, meticulously collected database, this book provides interesting insight into bilingual language acquisition.