The Importance of Paradigm Formation in Bilingual Acquisition: Evidence from Italian*

This paper argues for a theory of lexical acquisition which takes syntactic transfer effects in bilinguals and overgeneralization in monolinguals to be manifestations of the same underlying mechanism. The theory views both transfer and overgeneralization as epiphenomena of an updating system which spreads newly acquired information across paradigms. A consequence of this set up is that both transfer effects and overgeneralization are only expected to affect members of the same paradigm. Experimental evidence, both old and new, is presented in support of this model.