Learning of the Instrumental Category by the Polish 2l1 Children

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

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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...