How different types of complexity can account for difficult structures in bilingual and monolingual language acquisition

Abstract

Certain linguistic structures are more challenging than others for bilingual speakers. This is true across different languages and language combinations. In this paper, we propose an account in terms of different types of linguistic complexity. Our argumentation derives from the results of a study based on a cloze test including 40 different linguistic structures of European Portuguese (EP). 180 children participated, all of them acquiring EP as a heritage language in Switzerland with different environmental languages (60 French-EP, 60 (Swiss) German-EP, and 60 Italian-EP bilinguals). The results show that the structures with the lowest accuracy rates are the same across the three groups. We single out four of these structures, namely, (i) que as a subject relative pronoun and as a consecutive conjunction, (ii) third person clitic pronouns in different forms and syntactic constellations, (iii) simple and contracted forms of prepositions, and (iv) the inflected infinitive in a concessive construction. We show that the difficulty of these structures reflects different forms of linguistic complexity: derivational complexity, memory-based learning, context dependency of rules and multiple form-function mappings. These forms of complexity cause difficulties also in monolingual acquisition.