Articles, adjectives and age of onset: the acquisition of Dutch grammatical gender

Abstract A comparison of the error profiles of monolingual (child L1) learners of Dutch, Moroccan children (child L2) and Moroccan adults (adult L2) learning Dutch as their L2 shows that participants in all groups massively overgeneralize [?neuter] articles to [+neuter] contexts. In all groups, the reverse gender mistake infrequently occurs. Gender expressed by Dutch attributive adjectives reveals an age-related asymmetry between the three groups, however. Whereas participants in the child groups overgeneralize one particular suffix (namely the schwa), adult participants use both adjectival fo... Mehr ...