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The presence of non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories has occupied a central place in both monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition research. In bilingual acquisition a central learnability issue has been to determine whether interlinguistic influence would interact with those patterns. In this article, the authors analyse the omission/production of subject pronouns in the developing Spanish grammar and of copula be in the developing English grammar of two EnglishSpanish simultaneous bilingual children in order to address the issues of the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence. The authors argue that the directionality of interlinguistic influence is determined by the need to implement core operations of the computational system and that the lexical-semantic interface is an area of the grammar where interlinguistic influence occurs.

We have argued that the grammatical features spell-out hypothesis (GFSH) (Liceras, Spradlin, Perales, Fernández, & Álvarez, 2003; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003a) accounts for the functional-lexical mixing patterns that prevail in the case of Determiner Phrases produced by bilingual (English-Spanish) children. This hypothesis (Liceras, 2002; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003b) states that in the process of activating the features of the two grammars, the child, who will rely on the two lexicons, will make codemixing choices which will favor the functional categories containing the largest array of uninterpretable features (Chomsky, 1998, 1999). This implies that in the case of English/ Spanish child acquisition data, mixed utterances such as el book (Spanish Determiner + English Noun) will prevail over mixed utterances such as the libro (English Determiner + Spanish Noun). Thus, in the process of acquisition, children pay special attention to the visible morpho-phonological triggers which lead to the activation of abstract formal features.

Previous research suggests that native speakers quickly adapt to the properties of the language in the surrounding context. For instance, as they repeatedly read a structure that is initially nonpreferred or infrequent, they show a reduction of processing difficulty. Adaptation has been accounted for in terms of error-based learning: the error resulting from the difference between the expected and actual input leads to an adjustment of the knowledge representation, which changes future expectations. The present study tested whether experiencing an error is sufficient for adaptation. We compared native English speakers and second language (L2) learners’ processing of, and adaptation to, two types of temporarily ambiguous structures that were resolved toward the nonpreferred interpretation. Whereas both native English and L2 speakers showed increased reading times at the disambiguating word versus a nonambiguous control, our data suggest that only native English speakers adapted, and only to one of the two structures. These results suggest that experiencing an error is not sufficient for adaptation, and that factors such as ease of revision and task effects may play a role as well.

In bilingual child language acquisition research, a recurrent learnability issue has been to investigate whether and how cross-linguistic influence would interact with the non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories. In this paper, we analyze the omission/production of subject pronouns in the earliest stage English grammar and the earliest stage Spanish grammar of two English–Spanish simultaneous bilingual children (FerFuLice corpus in CHILDES). We base this analysis on Holmberg’s (2005, Is there a little pro? Evidence from Finnish. Linguistic Inquiry 36. 533–564) and Sheehan’s (2006, The EPP and null subjects in Romance. Newcastle: Newcastle University PhD dissertation) formulation of the null subject parameter and on Liceras et al.’s (2012, Overt subjects and copula omission in the Spanish and the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: On the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence. First Language 32(1–2). 88–115) assumptions concerning the role of lexical specialization in cross-linguistic influence. We have conducted a comparative analysis of the patterns of production/omission of English and Spanish overt and null subjects in two bilingual children, on the one hand, versus the patterns of production/omission of one monolingual English child and one monolingual Spanish child, on the other. The results show that while there is no conclusive evidence as to whether or not English influences the higher production of overt subjects in child bilingual Spanish, the presence of null subjects in Spanish has a positive influence in the eradication of non-adult null subjects in bilingual English. We argue that in a bilingual situation, as compared to a monolingual one, lexical specialization in one of the languages of the bilinguals (the availability of an overt and a null realization of the subject in Spanish) facilitates the acquisition of the other language.