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.

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Where do the two languages of the bilingual child interact? The literature has debated whether bilingual children have delays in the acquisition of direct objects. The variety of methods and languages involved have prevented clear conclusions. In a transitivity-based approach, null objects are a default structural possibility, present in all languages. Since the computation of lexical and syntactic transitivity depends on lexical acquisition, we propose a default retention hypothesis, predicting that bilingual children retain default structures for aspects of syntactic development specifically linked to lexical development (such as objects). Children acquiring French (aged 3;0–4;2, N = 34) in a monolingual context and a French/English bilingual context participated in a study eliciting optional and obligatory direct objects. The results show significant differences between the rates of omissions in the two groups for both types of objects. We consider two models of how the bilingual lexicon may determine the timetable of development of transitivity.

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This article examines the phenomenon of object clitic omission in French. Previous research contains contradictory results depending on the source of the data: it seems that in spontaneous production children prefer DPs while in elicited production they prefer omissions. It is proposed that a common methodology be used across different modalities in measuring the rate of omissions, and that the notion of «illicit object omission» be dispensed with. The analysis of the proposed «clitic-contexts» reveals that the strategy favoured by children is omission of all kinds of lexical material in both spontaneous and elicited production. Moreover, it is shown that child behaviour is quantitatively different from the adult one. These findings have consequences on the status of null objects in child grammar: child grammar allows optional object deletion without clitic recoverability, as opposed to adult grammar. Several theoretical approaches are evaluated in the light of the new findings.