Comments on the paper Gender acquisition in bilingual children: French–German, Italian–German, Spanish–German and Italian–French

Abstract

The article by Eichler, Jansen, and Muller presents a genuine and impressive contribution to the study of bilingual first acquisition in general and to the analysis of gender acquisition in particular. Analyzing the transparency of the gender systems in different pairs (French- German, Italian-German, Spanish-German, and Italian-French) and looking at different acquisition paths (i.e. balanced and unbalanced acquisition), the authors claim that not only gender rules but also individual strategies in the number of noun types acquired affect the accuracy of gender assign- ment in child speech. Moreover, the study does not corroborate (Eichler, 2012), as happened in former studies, that unbalanced acquisition tends to result in not acquiring specific linguistic aspects (here: gender; see however the discussion on neuter in German in section 3.3). It is rather claimed that the low amount of production (here: number of noun types in the weaker language)- and maybe of input-might lead to different, incomplete analyses (here: to a low accuracy in gender assignment).The authors provide a good overview of previous studies on the acquisition of gender in mono- lingual and bilingual contexts, arguing that Romance languages are more transparent and thus easier to acquire when it comes to gender assignment. In fact, the reliability of gender cues is shown to differ between the languages under discussion, Spanish and Italian having the most transparent rules, followed by French and, finally, German (see also Eichler, 2012). It seems that gender mark- ing (and whether case and number are also marked and thus co-occur with gender in determiner phrases) affects the acquisition of gender as well.In sum, the present article suggests that it is worth having a closer look at the individual develop- ment of the two languages in bilinguals (in this study, the production of noun types in each child has been explored), for it might explain delays in acquisition despite the transparency of the gender system. A reduced input, and therefore a reduced lexicon, seems to affect the gender accuracy rates.Future studies on both monolingual and bilingual development in different acquisition contexts, including languages with no gender (e.g. Turkish) and those without articles, which mark gender on nouns (Arabic languages, Russian), might promote the idea that not only the languages involved can predict inaccurate gender assignment but also the acquisition context-primarily the amount of noun types acquired and uttered.Eicher et al.'s results are helpful to shed light on further research issues, such as the incomplete acquisition of languages in the context of migration. As Montrul (2008) has shown in her book, in which former and new studies are discussed, different results will be reached at the end state of acquisition depending on the acquisition settings. Early bilingualism in children might lead to the successful mastery of both linguistic systems but could also result in the mastery of only and to the incomplete acquisition of the other system. This is more likely to occur in the well-studied strategy one person-one language than in other situations because only parent is able to sup- port the minority language. Acquiring two languages in the context of migration on the other hand-according to Montrul-might result in the successful acquisition of both languages given that both parents provide input in the minority language. These findings are very interesting and have a huge sociopolitical impact: not only do they revalue the acquisition setting one at home-one outside (for an overview of multilingual acquisition settings, see Romaine, 1995) and thus the importance of supporting heritage languages. These results also encourage educational programs such as the dual-language and thus enforce bilingual programs.As, for example, Mueller Gathercole (2002) has shown studying Spanish-English children in the United States, less gender agreement errors are stated in Spanish in those children who have the greatest amount of input in Spanish. …