Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual grammars: Evidence from gender assigment in unilingual Dutch and mixed speech

Abstract

This study reports on grammatical gender assignment in elicited production data from heritage speakers of Turkish, Papiamento, and Spanish in the Netherlands. We selectively target the nominal domain, consisting of a determiner, a noun, and an adjective. Previous studies have demonstrated gender to be vulnerable in bilingual acquisition (e.g., Gathercole & Thomas 2005; Mitrofanova et al. 2018). The presence of grammatical gender in one language may affect gender assignment in the other language, suggesting cross-linguistic influence (Egger, Hulk & Tsimpli 2018; Eichler, Jansen & Müller 2013; Kaltsa, Tsimpli & Argyri 2019). In this chapter, we investigate the role of cross-linguistic influence from the heritage language onto the societal language by comparing three HLs that differ in terms of the properties of the nominal domain, including gender. Determiner phrase (DP) constructions consisting of a determiner, noun, and adjective were elicited by means of a director-matcher task (Gullberg, Indefrey &Muysken 2009), which was performed both in a unilingual Dutch mode, and in a code-switching mode. The results show that all groups tend to overgeneralize the common gender in the Dutch unilingual mode. Strikingly, heritage speakers of Spanish performed more target-like than the Papiamento and Turkish speakers, which is probably related to the fact that Turkish and Papiamento do not have a grammatical gender system, whereas Spanish distinguishes masculine and feminine gender in the DP. As for code-switching from Dutch to the HL, we observe a similar preference for the common gender, such that most speakers tend to assign common gender to nouns that are inserted from their respective HLs into Dutch DPs. Some speakers also apply a gender assignment strategy based on the translation equivalent of the noun in Dutch, or produce a postnominal adjective construction with an uninflected adjective. An analysis of extra-linguistic variables demonstrated that in both the unilingual and the code-switching mode, gender assignment strategies seem to be determined to some extent by the degree of dominance of the societal language.