L1 and L2 Acquisition of Dutch Adjectival Inflection

Abstract

In this paper results are presented from experiments involving L1 acquisition as well as child and adult L2 acquisition of Dutch adjectival inflection.First of all these results support a morphological theory of the inflectional system in which forms that are similar at the surface (namely, bare adjectives) receive a rather different analysis.In addition the results suggest that acquisition of inflection is age dependent.While children acquire the inflectional system very easily, this is not the case for adults.It is shown that L1 and child L2 learners make errors in a similar direction and show a rather homogenous development, while adult L2 learners behave rather differently in these respects.The parallel between the L1 learners and the child L2 learners does not imply, however, that they reach the same end state.This is also interpreted as an effect of age dependency.It is argued that the results are in line with a commonly held assumption on language contact, namely that different forms of L2 acquisition may eventually corrupt the inflectional system and may lead to deflection.* This paper circulated since 2001 in a prefinal version and functioned as the pilot for the NWO research programme Variation in Inflection.Although this programme will lead to results and publications that include the present paper, we decided that a separate publication of the pilot is useful.We would like to thank all subjects who participated in the experiments.We also thank the audiences of several workshops and conferences where some earlier version of this paper was presented and where we received many valuable suggestions.The present version of this paper owes much to our colleagues of ACLC, and in particular to the reviewers of the ACLC Working Papers.