Commentary on Larrañaga & Guijarro-Fuentes’s The linguistic competence of early Basque–Spanish bilingual children and a Spanish monolingual child

Abstract

This article approaches the study of gender marking in early European Spanish and is based on the analysis of the determiners produced by three children, one monolingual and two bilinguals, in spontaneous interactions. Mastering gender marking in this language implies having acquired the knowledge of the features of the D head, the architecture of determiner phrases (DPs) and the DP internal agreement mechanisms that make the head, its adjuncts and its specifier share such features. Larranaga and Guijarro Fuentes (henceforth L & GF) assume that target-like DPs in Spanish are complex structures containing several functional projections between the DP projection and the noun phrase (NP), in which number and gender features are checked.The authors observe that children do not undergo any initial stage of default gender during the process of acquiring the structure of DP. As a first result, monolinguals and bilinguals behave similarly in this respect, as no exclusive overgeneralisation of the masculine gender is attested in any of the three children. In contrast, the higher amount of errors as well as the longer duration of the period of erroneous productions in the bilingual corpora are interpreted as evidence for a delayed acquisition of the internal architecture of the Spanish DP, attributable to some effect of the other language of the bilinguals, Basque, which lacks gender specification as well as DP internal agreement.The originality of this article lies basically in the detailed description and quantification of early gender marking production by children acquiring two languages for which not many longitudinal or cross-sectional studies on early DPs are available. Moreover, the approach to the contrastive description of DP architectures of both unrelated languages is a field few have explored from the theoretical perspective. Furthermore, the theoretical framework in which the results are discussed contrasts with most of the previous studies on early gender marking in Spanish, developed following non-generative or pre-minimalist models.In the introductory section, L & GF review the descriptive work dealing with the relation between grammatical and natural gender in Spanish. In addition to the examples of mismatch in natural versus grammatical gender mentioned, this section would also benefit from distinguishing between the so-called genero comun, 'common gender', in which the determiner is solely responsible for marking the difference between male and female (el/la pianista, 'the-M/the-F pianist'), and the genero epiceno, in which the N is indistinctively marked for the one gender option, regardless of the natural gender of their reference (F marking in la joven victima, 'the - male or female - young victim' or M in el bebe lloron, 'the - male or female - cry-baby'). Mention of grammatical mismatch such as the change of determiner in cacophonic contexts (*la agua clara, 'the-F water-F clear-F', vs. el agua clara, 'the-M water-F clear-F') would add cohesion to the text, as examples of this kind are reported in children's corpora. At this point, some discussion of the formal, inherent character and of the (un)interpretability of the gender feature in Spanish would not be redundant.An important topic in the argumentation on the (dis)similarities between monolingual and bilin- gual acquisition is the potential interlinguistic effect of the other language. Structurally different configurations of DP in Basque and Spanish turn out to be the central subject of the first section. L & GF adopt recent theoretical proposals on the complexity of DPs for Spanish and Basque languages, which allow the authors to delimit the field for their study of the potential interlinguistic influence in children's acquisition of gender and the structure of DP in Spanish. The presence (Spanish) versus the absence of Class P (Basque) as responsible for the corresponding feature checking by attracting N to Class in Spanish versus N remaining in situ in Basque constitutes an attractive field for testing interlinguistic influence. …