Declension Errors in Polish of Bilingual Children of Preschool Age – Multiple Case Study

Abstract

T In this paper, the inflectional errors in Polish of bilingual children were examined. My studies focus particularly on declension errors, which reflect the level of Polish grammar acquisition by pre‑school bilinguals. I investigated what the level of command of the Polish declension system by bilingual children is. I also sought to determine the declension errors characteristic for the surveyed children and which case categories posed the greatest difficulty for them. The method was multiple case study. The research results show the most common types of inflectional errors made by bilingual children in the Polish language and which case categories presented the greatest challenge for them. It can be seen that inflectional errors are closely related to the second language interference, so the types of inflectional errors were predicted by L2 (different for every child). Moreover, the most challenging case categories were dative and locative. The study found that the lower the frequency of the case, the more errors associated with it were observed in the utterances of children. Such a result may indicate that cross‑linguistic transfer and frequency of use are among the main factors of grammar acquisition.