Bilingual and monolingual children's acquisition of Spanish dative alternation structures: order of acquisition and adult input effects

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Spanish dative alternation
• bilingual acquisition
• monolingual acquisition
• emergence
• adult input
• dative clitic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Silvia Sánchez Calderón http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1599-236X

Raquel Fernández Fuertes http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3889-6194

Notes

1 Romanian allows the two options of the DOCD parameter since it is argued that ‘within the crosslinguistic distribution of clitic use, the [-DOCD] parameter is a proper subset of the [+DOCD] parameter since all languages that permit [+DOCD] constructions (as it is the case in Romanian) also permit [-DOCD] constructions, and the opposite does not hold true’ (Ungureanu 2017, 19).

2 Recall that the ages of onset of Spanish DA have been used as a measure of grammatical competence in production data (as in Snyder and Stromswold 1997).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Castile and León Regional Government (Spain), ORDEN EDU/1083/2013, 27 December, co-funded by the European Social Funding and the University of Valladolid (Spain); by the Castile and León Regional Government and FEDER (ref. VA009P17); as well as by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and FEDER (ref. PGC2018-097693-B-ICO).