The acquisition of Voice alternations by Greek-German bilingual children

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Artemis Alexiadou
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2013 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 238712922

This project aims to investigate the child acquisition of Voice alternations. We aim to explore how bilingual children, who are exposed to languages that have different morpho-syntactic ways to express Voice alternations, acquire these Voice systems. In particular, we investigate the acquisition of reflexives/reciprocals, unmarked and marked anticausatives, and passives by bilingual German-Greek speaking children in Germany. Since very few previous studies are available with regard to the acquisition of Voice alternations by actually the control groups, L1 German and L1 Greek, the project aims to investigate next to the bilingual acquisition also the German and Greek monolingual acquisition. The investigation of these Voice alternations aims to explore the Uniqueness Hypothesis (Armon-Lotem & al., 2016), i.e. the idea that structures uniquely marked in form will be acquired earlier than underspecified structures. Similarly for the bilingual acquisition, uniquely marked structures in form are expected to transfer in the underspecified structures, but not the other way around. Methodologically, we aim to evaluate and analyze the data we collected from both our longitudinal and narrative studies in all three groups, L1 German, L1 Greek and bilingual German-Greek. Additionally, we plan to complete the elicited production experiments we are currently running for L1 Greek in Greece, with L1 German and bilingual German-Greek children from October 2016 in Germany.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants