The development of gender in simultaneous and successive bilingual acquisition of French : Evidence for AOA and input effects

This study investigates the effects of Age of Onset of Acquisition (AOA) and the quality and quantity of input on the longitudinal development of gender in the acquisition of French by simultaneous (2L1) and successive bilinguals (cL2). Three exponents of French gender are studied: the discovery of the abstract GENDER feature, gender assignment and gender concord. The findings show that the amount and quality of input correlate with the rate of acquisition of gender attribution, but most clearly in the 2L1 group. With respect to gender concord, group-level analyses suggest that input is less important than AOA. The results are discussed in relation to previous studies on the development of other morphosyntactic structures in the same children. We conclude that a combination of AOA, the L1 acquistional timetable, linguistic properties of the target structure and input are all crucial aspects for a complete understanding of linguistic development in bilingual children