Testing the Domain-by-Age Model: Inflection and placement of Dutch verbs

Generalizing over various observations on the language development of children acquiring a second language (child L2 acquisition), Schwartz (2003: 47) concludes that “in the domain of inflectional morphology, child L2 acquisition is more like child L1 acquisition, and in the domain of syntax, child L2 acquisition is more like adult L2 acquisition”. One implication of this generalization is that inflection is influenced by age of onset, whereas knowledge of syntax is not. In this contribution, results from a series of production experiments on child and adult L2 Dutch are discussed showing that children and adults have different profiles in both linguistic domains, contrary to Schwartz (2003).