Delay, interference and bilingual development: The acquisition of verbal morphology in children learning Basque and Spanish

Abstract

In this article, I examine the acquisition of verbal agreement morphology in a cross-sectional study of 20 bilingual children and 19 monolingual children acquiring Basque and Spanish. The results indicate that some of the bilingual children produce more root infinitives (RIs) in Basque than monolingual children do. I claim that this discrepancy is a consequence of different patterns of exposure to Basque that the children receive, rather than being attributable to cross-linguistic influence from Spanish. I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of bilingual development as well as for morphological acquisition more generally.