Euskara H2 goiztiarraren ezaugarrien bila: adizkiak eta gramatika-kasuak haurren ipuin-kontaketetan

Abstract

This research focuses on the person and number marking in the inflected verb forms, as well as the ergative, absolutive and dative case marking on the nPs produced by bilingual children in a narrative task in Basque. The data confirms the presence of errors in two groups of five year-old children (Basque L1 and e(arly)L2). The comparative study between groups (L1 vs. eL2) as well as the comparison between two samples of the eL2 group, obtained with an interval of 6 months, revealed interesting findings concerning the degree of maturity in the production of the person morphology by children under 6 years of age. In the production of conjugated verb forms there are no appreciable quantitative differences between either the L1 and eL2 groups between the two samples of the eL2 group, given the low frequency of erroneous forms (10%) in the three samples. Differences found among the three samples are qualitative, as it can be observed in the distribution of some agreement forms and agreement contexts considered “difficult”. The production of some morphological cases are clearly distinguishable from L1 to eL2. Even though, the production of ergative case occurs, both in L1 as well as in the eL2 samples, always in contexts where one would expect the production of such a mark, the production of the dative case is almost always adult-like in L1, whilst most noticeable incorrect uses are appreciated in the L2t group, especially in its first session. The frequent overuse of the zero marking (corresponding to the absolutive case) by the L2t group in contexts of other cases such as the ergative distinguishes this group from the L1 group. The data analysed show a different pace in the acquisition of case morphology and argument- verb agreement marking, especially for ergative case.