On the role of age of onset and input in early child bilingualism in Greek and Dutch

Although input quantity has been shown to affect language development in bilingual acquisition (e.g., Cobo-Lewis et al. 2002, De Houwer 2008), the relationship between the amount of input and linguistic proficiency is not necessarily direct (e.g., Thordadottir 2008). Furthermore, input effects may be mediated by and interact with other factors. One such factor is age of onset (AO). In particular, it has recently been claimed that the morphosyntactic development of children with AO after 4 years is quantitatively and qualitatively different from those with AO before this age (Meisel 2009). This paper reports on a crosslinguistic study of the acquisition of grammatical gender in English/Dutch and English/Greek bilinguals to examine the effects of input quantity and AO in early child bilingualism.