Challenges in adjective agreement: an experimental study on bilingual children and adults learning Lithuanian as a foreign language

Abstract

This study aims to discuss the challenges faced by bilingual children and non-native adults in agreement of adjectival words while learning Lithuanian. The study used an experimental task based on children’s language corpus. This task was designed to reflect the diversity of adjectival and noun declension paradigms and grammatical categories. Data was collected from 35 bilingual children and 25 adults learning Lithuanian as a foreign language. The results of this study show that bilingual children primarily struggle with gender agreement in adjectival words, while non-native adults most frequently make errors in paradigm agreement. These errors are related to changing the endings of unproductive paradigms to productive ones, replication of noun inflections, and a preference for unmarked grammatical categories over marked ones.