This study focuses on the acquisition of Spanish active and passive voice in Spanish-English simultaneous bilingual children (n = 5) and monolingual children (n = 5), matched in mean length of utterance measured in words (MLUw). Spontaneous longitudinal data were extracted from CHIld Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Our results point to the similar emergence of active monotransitives and the two types of verbal passives (impersonal se-passives and canonical determiner phrase ([DP]-passives) in the two child groups. This convergence is observed despite the apparent morphological and distributional differences in the surface structure of the two passive types. This suggests that both Spanish passive types are construed under an analogous DP-movement syntactic mechanism. Moreover, the bilingual and the monolingual children's preference for the use of actives over passives and the higher frequency rates of impersonal se-passives than canonical DP-movement passives seem to be associated with adult input frequency effects, which modulate the developmental incidence of these constructions but not their initial availability in the grammar. These findings support a grammar-driven view of early voice acquisition and show that the similar acquisition and incidence patterns of Spanish active and verbal passives in bilinguals and monolinguals argue for autonomous development. It also sheds light on the bilinguals' absence of crosslinguistic influence effects from English into Spanish leading to delay or interference.
Children benefit from morphosyntactic cues such as grammatical number marking and derivational rules when learning cardinals (one, two, three) and ordinals (first, second, third). However, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often have difficulties with morphosyntax. We therefore hypothesized that they cannot use morphosyntactic cues to the same extent in their numerical development. We investigated this by comparing the performance of 27 kindergartners with (suspected) DLD (4;04-6;09) and 42 typically developing (TD) peers (4;03-6;04) on two counting measures (Rote Counting & Next Number and two measures of numerical knowledge (Give Me, and Tell Me). The study also explored how verbal and non-verbal background measures predicted children's counting ability and ordinal comprehension. In line with previous research, we found that children with DLD have counting deficits. In addition, our results revealed substantial delays in ordinal acquisition and qualitative differences between the groups. Unlike TD peers, children with DLD frequently interpreted ordinals as cardinals, and they also failed at different points in the counting routine. We argue that these deviating error-patterns reflect difficulties with rule-based learning. The explanatory role of language deficits was further substantiated by the fact that differences between the tasks were mediated by language abilities. These findings shed new light on numeracy deficits associated with DLD and emphasize the importance of not only investigating quantitative, but also qualitative differences between groups on numeracy tasks.
Although extensively studied in monolinguals, research on the development of functional categories in bilingual children remains limited. This paper contributes novel data through two corpus studies on the development of the left periphery in Germanic-Romance bilinguals acquiring German-Italian, German-Spanish, and Dutch-Italian. In the first study, I show that (some) complementizer phrase (CP) structures are produced early across all languages and children, while the development of topicalization strategies (e.g. topicalization vs. clitic left dislocation [CLLD]) shows strong language-specific effects. Topics are systematically early-acquired in their Germanic languages, whereas CLLD in Romance emerges significantly later-corroborating findings from monolingual studies. A second, supplementary corpus study on the development of cliticization furthermore shows that the late development of CLLD is not attributable to (similarly) late development of clitics; it is specific to CLLD. I explore potential explanations for this language-driven asymmetry, particularly their relative parametric complexity. Overall, I propose these results are problematic for approaches assuming crosslinguistically fixed and late development of CP, such as mainstream maturational approaches, favoring instead early CP development.
