The Acquisition of Complex Deverbal Words by a French-English Bilingual Child

This study explores the acquisition of complex words composed of both verbs and nouns through novel forms produced spontaneously by a French-English bilingual child. Diary recordings were kept by the child's mother from ages 2:8 to 5:0. The results showed little support for a proposed developmental sequence based on cross-sectional data (e.g., Clark & Barron, 1988). Instead, the child usually produced grammatical forms in both languages, though few were in French. In English, he often used –er attached to verbs before nouns and meaning something similar to –ing(and sometimes, although much less frequently, vice versa). These results suggest that children use multiple cues in acquiring deverbal constructions, including existing grammatical forms and the frequency of these forms.