Cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of grammatical gender in Dutch as a heritage language in bilingual children

Abstract

The influence of one of a bilingual’s languages on the other is known as cross-linguistic influence (CLI). In grammatical gender acquisition, CLI can occur during gender discovery, assignment and agreement. The present study investigates CLI in Dutch as a heritage language, a language with a non-transparent gender system, in two groups of bilingual children. One (i.e., Dutch-German bilingual children) is acquiring languages with similar gender systems and the other (i.e., Dutch-French bilingual children) is acquiring languages with more distant gender systems. We found CLI in gender discovery, gender assignment and gender agreement for the Dutch-German group but not for the Dutch-French group. Moreover, CLI simultaneously facilitated and hindered gender acquisition within the children, depending on the gender congruency of the nouns. This suggests co-activation of grammatical gender values in bilingual children. The findings help us better understand when cross-linguistic influence takes place and how it affects acquisition in bilingual children.