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Bilingual effects: Exploring object omission in pronominal languages*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2013

MIHAELA PIRVULESCU ,
ANA-TERESA PÉREZ-LEROUX ,
YVES ROBERGE ,
NELLEKE STRIK  and
DANIELLE THOMAS
MIHAELA PIRVULESCU*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
ANA-TERESA PÉREZ-LEROUX
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
YVES ROBERGE
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
NELLEKE STRIK
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
DANIELLE THOMAS
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
*
Address for correspondence: Mihaela Pirvulescu, University of Toronto Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Rd. North, North Bldg., Mississauga, Ontario, L5L 1C6, Canada. ma.pirvulescu@utoronto.ca
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Abstract

This article assesses the impact of bilingualism on the acquisition of pronominal direct objects in French and English (clitics in French and strong pronouns in English). We show that, in comparison to monolingual children, bilingual children omit more pronominal objects for a longer period in both languages. At the same time, the development in each language spoken by the bilinguals follows the developmental asymmetry found in the language of their monolingual counterparts: there are more omissions in French than in English. It is also shown that language dominance affects the rate of omissions as there are fewer omissions in the language in which children receive more exposure, i.e. the dominant language. We analyze these results as reflecting a bilingual effect based on the retention of a default null object representation. This in turn is supported by reduced overall input for bilingual children and by language-internal input ambiguity.

Keywords

simultaneous bilingual acquisitionbilingual delayobject cliticsnull objectsobject omissioncross-linguistic influenceinputvariational learning modelFrenchEnglish
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 495 - 510
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Isabel Belzil, Jürgen Meisel and Johanne Paradis, the audience at the conference International Symposium on Bilingualism 8, Oslo 2011, and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. This work was partially funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (410–05–0239 and 410–09–2026).

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