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The Acquisition of Case-Marking –
Learning of the Instrumental Category
By the Polish 2L1 Children
KACPER KRZYSZTOF SULAK
STUDENT ID NUMBER: 10391452
SEMINAR: E ARLY VS.LATE ACQUISITION, TERM 1, 2012/13
PROGRAMME: MA IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS
TEACHING STAFF: DR. OLAF KOENEMAN
HAND-IN DATE: 26TH OF OCTOBER, 2012
1
1. Introduction
Polish language is often argued to be one of the hardest languages to learn. It is a
grammatically complex language marked by rich morphology with “a fairly elaborate system
of case inflections” (Dąbrowska & Szczerbiński 2006: 561). Despite its complexity, Polish L1
children seem to productively use the case inflection from the early age. In her recent work,
Dąbrowska & Szczerbiński (2006) proposed that even two-year-old Polish children were
already productive with most of the inflections of Polish grammatical cases with nonce
nouns, and the four-year-olds gave mostly adult-like responses on the same task. This study
was followed by another test in which Dąbrowska & Tomasello (2008) looked at Polish
children’s1 production of instrumental construction with novel verbs. While the results of the
first study gave evidence supporting usage-based model of language acquisition of Polish
children, the second study did not specifically support this model, but gave negative
evidence to the view that the early language acquisition is driven by some innate
mechanisms.
The previous studies looked specifically at the productivity of case inflections of the Polish L1
children; therefore, there is a need to expand on this topic with reference to the Polish
simultaneous bilingual children2. Would the 2L1 children perform similarly to their L1 peers
or would they perform less effectively and their results would pattern with the results of an
L2 learner? To investigate this specific issue of language production, I propose a study which
will reproduce the design of Dąbrowska & Tomasello’s (2008) test of instrumental...