Abstract

Research in bilingual first language acquisition has been guided by two main approaches: either it has been assumed that children who are exposed to two languages from birth are not able to separate their two languages from early on (Taeschner 1983, Volterra & Taeschner 1978) since the two languages seem to influence each other, or it has been shown that there is evidence for very early language separation and the Jack of crosslinguistic influence (Meisel 1989, 1994b, 1997, Genesee 1989, Genesee, Nicoladis & Paradis 1995). The present paper argues that both early language separation and crosslinguistic influence can be observed in one bilingual child during the same developmental stage for different grammatical phenomena (Gawlitzek-Maiwald & Tracy 1996, Hulk 1997, Hulk & Müller 2000, Müller, Hulk & Jakubowicz 1999, Müller & Hulk 2000, 2001). Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual children has three manifestations: Transfer consists of the incorporation of a grammatical property into one language from the other. Acceleration means that a certain property emerges in the grammar earlier than would be the norm in monolingual acquisition. Delay means that bilinguals may be behind monolinguals in their progress in grammatical development. In other words, crosslinguistic influence may have positive and negative effects. Recent studies which have observed crosslinguistic influence have explained the influence by language dominance (Gawlitzek-Maiwald & Tracy 1996, Hulk 1997, Schlyter 1994, Tracy 1995). In the present paper we intend to show that the three kinds of manifestation of crosslinguistic influence depend on the particular grammatical phenomenon, but they are independent of language dominance. Crosslinguistic influence is expected to occur in exactly those areas which are also problematic (although to a lesser extent) for monolingual children. lt will be argued that one prerequisite for crosslinguistic influence is a certain amount of overlap of the two languages in the bilingual child: a construction in language A allows for more than one analysis (from the child's perspective) and language B contains positive evidence for one ofthose possible analyses ( cf. Hulk & Müller 2000, Müller & Hulk 2001 ). Although the occurrence of crosslinguistic influence is related to grammatical properties, its direction (i.e. which language is being influenced) is related to computational complexity (in the sense of Jakubowicz 1999). Data from bilingual ltalian/German children will be discussed. lt will be shown that German influences ltalian for argument omissions, and the influence has the effect of delay. For V2 and finite verb placement in subordinate clauses, ltalian has an influence on German. Whereas the influence has a positive effect in the case of V2, it has a negative effect in the case of finite verb placement in subordinate clauses.