Assessing Age of Onset Effects in (Early) Child L2 Acquisition

Abstract

This study compares the development of three different types of bilingual/second language children in their acquisition of gender-marking on adjectives in Dutch to investigate whether there is evidence for age-of-onset effects in early childhood as proposed by Meisel (2009). The three groups of children are: simultaneous bilingual children, exposed to Dutch and English from birth; early successive bilingual children, first exposed to Dutch between the ages of 1 and 3 years; and second language children, whose age at first exposure ranged from 4 to 10 years. In an initial analysis that included all children, early successive bilingual and in particular second language children produced qualitatively different errors from the other bilingual and monolingual groups. It is argued, however, that these errors resulted from transfer from the children's other language, English. Once children's knowledge of gender attribution is taken into account, similar error profiles were observed across all groups (contraMeisel 2009).