Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique
Ce séminaire reçoit des conférenciers invités spécialisés dans différents domaines de la linguistique. Les membres du Département, les étudiants et les personnes externes intéressées sont tous cordialement invités. Description du séminaire 
| Titre | Article production in "early" L2 German by children with L1 Turkish |
| Conférencier | Manuela Schonenberger (Uni. de Oldenburg) |
| Date | mardi 13 mars 2012 |
| Heure | 12h15 |
| Salle | L208 (Bâtiment Candolle) |
| Description | The focus of this talk is on the acquisition of articles in German by successive bilingual children with L1 Turkish, an article-less language. There is not much literature on the acquisition of articles in child L2. Pfaff (1992) reports that two Turkish children persist in omitting articles in L2 German. Zdorenko and Paradis (2008) observe that in their experimental data children of an article-less L1 omitted articles in L2 English more often than did children of an L1 with articles, at least in the initial stages of L2 acquisition. They note that article misuse rather than article omission was the main error in both groups of children.
To study article use in L2 German, I examined spontaneous production data from four successive bilingual children with L1 Turkish and an age of onset of 3. After 12 months of exposure (ME) to German the rate of article omission drops to around 20% and stays constant until the last recordings, at 30 ME. Article omission in monolingual German children drops to below 10% around age 3 (Eisenbeiss 2000), and is not preceded by a plateau effect. When the successive bilingual children produced an article it was generally correct. They produced definite articles in contexts requiring a definite article and indefinite articles in contexts requiring an indefinite article: article omission rather than article misuse was the main error.
The context of Prepositional Phrases appears particularly vulnerable to article omission by monolinguals as well as by the successive bilingual children, which may be indicative of a problem with the representation of functional elements (Eisenbeiss 2000, Ferrari and Matteini 2009). But, in contrast to monolingual German children, the successive bilingual children generally produce unreduced rather than reduced articles, which may reflect an additional problem with the prosodic representation of articles (cf. Goad and White (2007, 2008), Snape and Kupisch (2010) on L2 English).
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