On Continuity and the Emergence of Functional Categories in Bilingual First-Language Acquisition

Abstract

A variety of positions have been proposed to explain the ontological development of functional categories. These positions follow either a Maturation or Continuity perspective. We examined the acquisition of inflectional phrase and determiner phrase in children acquiring French and English simultaneously in order to evaluate the descriptive adequacy of the two perspectives. Crosslinguistic comparisons are essential to testing Maturation versus Continuity, and bilingual children are excellent participants in crosslinguistic research because the two languages reside within one individual. We collected naturalistic production data from two bilingual children ages 1;9 to 2;11 and 1;11 to 3;0 who were at Brown's Stage I (mean length of utterance < 2.00). Our analyses indicate that the use of function morphemes associated with Inflection Oat) appeared at different times in the children's languages, whereas the use of determiners appeared at the same time. The between-language discrepancy in the emergence of Infl-associated items demonstrates the influence of external factors, such as specific language input, on the acquisition of functional categories. Thus, we argue that our results are most consistent with a Continuity perspective.