Linguistic advantages of bilingualism: The acquisition of Dutch pronominal gender

Numerous studies demonstrate that early child bilingualism is associated with various cognitive advantages. However, relatively little is known about linguistic advantages of bilingualism. This paper tests the hypothesis that knowledge of a language with a salient and transparent system of grammatical gender (Russian) may accelerate the acquisition of the less transparent system of pronominal gender in Dutch. To this end, we compare pronoun use in the narratives produced by monolingual Dutch-speaking children, age-matched Russian-Dutch simultaneous bilinguals, Dutch-speaking adults, as well as Russian-speaking children and adults acquiring Dutch as a second language. The results demonstrate that monolingual Dutch children are still in the process of acquiring feminine pronouns around age 7 and tend to use masculine pronouns across the board, even with reference to female characters. In contrast, bilingual children acquiring Dutch and Russian from birth use both masculine and feminine pronouns and perform similarly to Dutch-speaking adults, which may be evidence of a bilingual advantage. Russian adults and children acquiring Dutch as a second language overuse feminine pronouns, presumably under the negative influence of their first language. The results suggest that cross-language transfer in a bilingual mind can be both positive (facilitating faster acquisition) and negative (resulting in errors).