Bilingual effects: Exploring object omission in pronominal languages

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.

The development of bimodal bilingualism

“… 7 Pirvulescu, Pérez-Leroux, Roberge, Strik & Thomas (2014) note a very high rate of object omission by 3- to 5-year old French-English bilinguals in their elicited production study. There are a number of differences between this study and Koulidobrova’s, so the explanation for this difference awaits further research.…”

Directionality of cross-linguistic influence: Which referring choices do bilingual Ukrainian–English children make?

“…Thus, the high rates of null objects in the English results and their distinct distribution compared to L1 English (e.g. from Pirvulescu et al, 2014) suggest that Ukrainian influences English in the bilingual grammar. Table 6 with the English results shows that the 4-year-olds use 30% of null objects and the 5-year-olds use 21% of null objects, which is more than 13-14% in Pirvulescu et al (2014).…”

“…H4 -The Bilingual Effect Hypothesis (Pirvulescu et al, 2014) H1 considers extra-linguistic/social factors and predicts that there will be individual or small group differences between bilingual children, and that their use of null or overt objects will reflect patterns of the dominant language applied to the weaker language, as defined by the language exposure and patterns of use, also known as 'language input' or 'extra-linguistic factors' (see P1 in (6)). …”

“…Ukrainian and English) will exhibit more omissions in 2L1 than in L1 acquisition, as in the English-French pair from Pirvulescu et al (2014) (see P4 in (6)). The summary of the main predictions is given below.…”

“…generalized linear mixed models, allowing us to compare bilingual (2L1) and monolingual (L1) Ukrainian data and to identify the main factors influencing children's responses. We also compare English 2L1 data to English L1 data from a previous study that used a similar experimental task (Pirvulescu et al, 2014). This paper is structured as follows.…”