Misrepresentation of Dutch neuter gender in older bilingual children?

Previous research revealed that monolingual children between 11- and 13-yearold
show a target-like production with respect to gender assignment of definite
determiners whereas this is not the case for bilingual children who massively
overgeneralize de. In order to further investigate this overgeneralization, we designed
an experimental decision task, "tapping the knowledge" of both monolingual
and bilingual children. Our results show that bilinguals fail to represent
abstract gender and that de and het are in free variation. The difference between
the production and comprehension data could suggest that bilinguals have
some awareness of de and het being gender markers. In that case, the overgeneralization
in the production data is possibly not a grammatical phenomenon, but
more likely a speech production strategy.