The present study focuses on the emergence of determiners, specifically definite and indefinite articles, in the speech of a bilingual child between 22 and 24 months of age. Data from Italian and English are compared with respect to age of first production and rate of acquisition. Preliminary findings seem to suggest that, despite the fact that the Italian determiner system is more complex than the English system as it includes gender and number features in addition to definiteness, age of first production is earlier in Italian than in English and acquisition proceeds at a faster rate in Italian.
Implications of morphological bootstrapping for the current debate on the emergence of functional categories are investigated supporting a lexicalist view of language acquisition.
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