De verwerving van het Nederlands: dummies en Verb Second.

According to the Representation Hypothesis, learners of Dutch use dummy -- semantically empty -- auxiliaries as a strategy to avoid verb movement. In this contribution, we will argue that speech production data of early and late second language learners of Dutch confirm this hypothesis in two ways. First, children who acquire Dutch as a second language use dummies in main clauses and produce dummies significantly less frequently in subordinate clauses, like monolingual Dutch-speaking children. Because these bilingual children have good knowledge of the Dutch verb placement rules, we conclude that their internal grammar requests for verb movement in main clauses and not in subordinate clauses. The avoidance strategy is therefore relevant in main clauses but not in subordinate clauses. Secondly, unlike the child participants, adult second language learners of Dutch hardly ever make a target-like word order distinction between main and embedded clauses. Their grammar does therefore not contain the verb movement requirement for main clauses. As expected, we found hardly any dummies in the main clauses of adult learners of Dutch. These findings do not only support the Representation Hypothesis for Dummies, but the observed differences between child and adult learners are also compatible with the Critical Period Hypothesis for the acquisition of grammar. A final conclusion is that the decline of dummies in child Dutch is influenced by accumulating input frequencies, and not by the growth of working memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]