Abstract

In recent research on cross-linguistic influence in German-Romance language combinations, it has been argued that there is temporary influence from the less complex language on the more complex one within a bilingual individual. This influence can be of a positive or a negative sort. First evidence for negative influence in the domain of case acquisition comes from longitudinal studies in Schmitz (2006). The present study adds a cross-sectional investigation of monolingual German (n=18) and bilingual German-Italian (n=14) children (4 and 7 years of age) with respect to accusative and dative case marking in German. Results confirm former findings by detecting a statistically significant delay in the acquisition of dative case marking in bilingual children at age 4. Contrary to that, bilingual children at age 7 do not show differences to monolingual acquisition of dative case. The delayed acquisition found in 4-year old bilinguals therefore can be claimed as cross-linguistic influence of a temporary nature only.