Le Carte Blanc or la Carte Blanche? Bilingual Children's Acquisition of French Adjective Agreement

Abstract

Because of less exposure to either language, bilingual children's language acquisition can be delayed relative to monolingual children in domains related to input frequency. This study predicted that the acquisition of gender agreement with adjectives in French would be delayed in bilingual children on a picture description task. The results showed that French‐English bilingual preschoolers were less accurate with feminine noun‐adjective agreement than monolinguals, a difference attributable to the differences in vocabulary scores, but not significantly less accurate with feminine determiner‐adjective agreement. The bilinguals were significantly less accurate with determiner‐noun agreement, a difference not attributable to vocabulary score differences. We argue that fewer input tokens lead to delayed gender agreement and fewer input types lead to delayed gender assignment.

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