Page 52 - Diversity in Action

Marco Magnani, Federica Ricci Garotti, and Katharina Salzmann

to the fact that the two languages do not develop at the same speed. The
language in which the child has reached a more advanced acquisition stage
serves to compensate for a structural gap in the ‘weaker’ language. In this
sense, in the German-English mixed utterance Cleanst du dein teeth (‘Are you
cleaning your teeth?;’ Tracy, 2008, p. 114), the child relies on the language in
which the morphological competence is more advanced, in this case German
(verbal ending -st for the second person singular), producing a perfect bilin-
gual utterance. Code-mixing thus becomes a powerful means of boosting
the other language, a process known as bilingual bootstrapping. Similarly, in
some cases children acquiring German as L2 transfer typical German mor-
phemes to otherwise Italian lexemes, as in ein *foglien, ein *gatten, where
the child attaches the German plural ending -en to the Italian word foglie
(Ger. Blätter ‘leaves’) and gatto (Ger. Katze ‘cat’). Despite the fact that the re-
sult is not correct in terms of accuracy, we have to acknowledge that the
child already knows something about German grammar (Salzmann & Vides-
ott, 2024).
Moreover, positive transfer also occurs at the syntactic level. Unlike late
L2 acquisition in adolescents and adults, the errors found in simultaneous
bilingual and early L2 acquisition are only to a limited extent caused by neg-
ative transfer (Grimm & Cristante, 2022, p. 14). As Haberzettl (2005) points out,
in German L2 the V-final position in subordinate clauses (e.g. weil ich krank
bin, literally ‘because I ill am’) is acquired faster by children with Turkish as
L1 than by children with Russian as L1, since Turkish is characterised by SOV-
structures in subordinate clauses while Russian is not. Nevertheless, the ac-
quisitional advantage of the Turkish over the Russian children is only transi-
tory and, as underlined above, positive transfer is possible only if the learners
are developmentally ready in terms of acquisition stages.
Another striking example of positive transfer is the acquisition of the V2
principle in German, which in simultaneous bilingual children can even be
accelerated. While some monolingual German children at a certain stage
tend to mix the V2 rule in main clauses with the V-final rule in subordinate
clauses, producing interrogative clauses with the V-final position (e.g. was
die Mama einkauft?* ‘what the mummy buys’ instead of was kauft die Mama
ein? ‘whatdoes the mummybuy?;’Tracy,2008,p.95), as ifitwas asubor-
dinate clause, in bilingual German-Italian children these structures do not
occur, probably because of the positive influence of the Romance language,
which does not present the V-final position in subordinate clauses (Müller et
al., 2007, p. 131). Grotesquely, in this case it is the L1–L2 distance that leads to
a positive outcome.

52