Sukzessiv-bilinguale Kinder : der Erwerb von Partizipien in der frühen Zweitsprache Deutsch

The study focuses on the acquisition of past participle inflection by children acquiring German as a second language. Two issues are addressed: the relevance of age of onset (AO) and critical periods, and the status of regular and irregular inflection. Longitudinal data from two Italian adult L2 learners and from seven successive bilingual Turkish children acquiring German (AO 3-4) are investigated. The main findings confirm that the adults acquire past participles unlike monolinguals and unlike the investigated bilingual children, indicating an effect of critical periods. The successive bilingual children behave basically like monolinguals. The bilingual children overgeneralize the regular suffix -t more often than the irregular suffix -n, which cannot be explained by frequency. This indicates the different representational status of these two inflections and strengthens dual mechanism accounts. Differences with respect to error frequencies can be explained on the phonological level.