Abstract
In this paper, we looked at the acquisition of gender agreement in the DP by bilingual children acquiring both a Romance (Spanish or French) and Germanic (Dutch) language. The prediction was that gender agreement would be acquired earlier by bilinguals in their Romance language than in Dutch. Seven French/Dutch and nine Spanish/Dutch children participated in a sentence completion task created to elicit gender-marked determiners. It turned out that the French/Dutch bilinguals made more errors in gender assignment in Dutch than in French, which confirms this hypothesis. The Spanish/Dutch bilinguals showed atypical behaviour, omitting articles in both Dutch and Spanish quite frequendy, which indicated a delay in both languages. Since the French/Dutch bilinguals were more proficient in both languages than their Spanish peers, we suggest that a certain proficiency in the two languages must be attained in order to prevent a delay in acquisition.
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