L1 and L2 acquisition between sentence and discourse: Comparing production and comprehension in child Dutch

This paper compares production and comprehension data from children acquiring Dutch as a second language (L2) with children acquiring Dutch as a first language (L1). Using the same experimental methodology for all subjects, it investigates how these two groups of learners acquire direct object scrambling, a property of Dutch which requires syntactic, semantic and discourse knowledge. A comparison of production and comprehension data from the same individuals suggests that in child L2 acquisition – as observed in child L1 acquisition – there is a discrepancy between production and comprehension in this domain. Contrary to what is generally expected to be the case, however, it is production which is more targetlike than comprehension. Several explanations for this finding are explored, including the lack of discourse integration and processing problems.