DDL keywords

One characterisation of bilingual development is the following: the two languages develop simultaneously and in the same way as for a monolingual child (De Houwer 1990, Leopold 1939-49, Meisel 1989). The bilingual children studied in this operation do not develop in this way. Instead, they show considerable differences in the development of their two languages. We address the following questions: how does the development of the weak language differ from the development of that language in monolingual children? Is development simply retarded or is it divergent?

The use of structures in elaborated monologue texts requires a high degree of automatic control over grammatical rules (Levelt 1989). All speaker/writers must perform a number of decisions during the production of a text and these decisions will have ramifications on the choice of structures used. It is the trace of these decisions in the produced text which is the object of study in this research operation.