Direct Objects and Language Acquisition

Pérez‐Leroux, Ana Teresa; Pirvulescu, Mihaela; Roberge, Yves

doi:10.1017/9781139086264

Cited by 42 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 192 publications

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“…The omission stage is normally over at age 3–4, with constant progresses as they grow up (Leonini, 2006 ; Tedeschi, 2009 ). A stage of optional clitic omission has been reported also in other languages endowed with a clitic pronominal system, including European Portuguese (Costa and Lobo, 2007 ), Catalan (Wexler et al, 2004 ) and French (Pérez-Leroux et al, 2018 ). On the other hand, clitic omission was not reported in languages like Spanish (Wexler et al, 2004 ), Romanian (Babyonyshev and Marin, 2004 ), Greek (Tsakali and Wexler, 2003 ), and Serbo-Croatian (Ilic and Ud Deen, 2004 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 75%

The Production of Clitic Pronouns: A Study on Bilingual and Monolingual Dyslexic Children

Vender

Mantione

et al. 2018

Front. Psychol.

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Clitic production is reported to be challenging for impaired children, suffering from dyslexia or SLI, and for early second language learners too. On the contrary, research has not directly investigated the relation between dyslexia, bilingualism and clitic production. The aim of our study is that of addressing this topic, by analyzing the performance of 4 groups of children in a clitic elicitation task: 25 Italian monolingual dyslexic children (mean age 10;08 years old), 33 Italian monolingual typically developing children (9;99 years old), 25 bilingual dyslexic children with Italian as L2 (10;31 years old) and 31 bilingual typically developing children with Italian as L2 (10;30 years old). As inclusion criteria, bilingual children had at least 5 years of exposure to Italian, including 3 years of consecutive school attendance in Italy. Clitic production was assessed by means of an elicitation task in which the pronoun had to be produced either in the simple present or in the present perfect; higher difficulties were expected in this last condition, in which the clitic has to agree in gender and number with the past participle. Results revealed that dyslexic children, both monolingual and bilingual, performed worse than controls both in the simple present and in the present perfect, indicating that clitic production is challenging in dyslexia. As for the bilingual children, instead, differences were found between the two tasks. In the simple present, bilingual children performed very accurately and similarly to their monolingual peers, indicating that a target performance with clitics is accomplished by typically developing children with a longer exposure to Italian and suggesting that previously reported difficulties were related to linguistic immaturity and are likely to disappear as their L2 exposure and competence grow. In the present perfect, instead, both groups of bilinguals performed worse than their monolingual peers, suggesting that bilingualism could exacerbate the difficulties in the most challenging condition. Importantly, however, no negative effect of bilingualism in clitic production was found once controlling for the subjects' vocabulary, evidencing the importance of lexical competence in the target language for a native-like performance in clitic production.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 75%

The Production of Clitic Pronouns: A Study on Bilingual and Monolingual Dyslexic Children

Vender

Mantione

et al. 2018

Front. Psychol.

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“…The acquisition of referential expressions by monolingual children has been the subject of a substantial body of research, because it contributes to our understanding of the linguistic constraints that shape referential choice, how they emerge and in which order and, importantly, how cross-linguistic differences modulate the development of this domain (Serratrice and Allen 2015). Research on the acquisition of referential expressions in bilingual contexts has enriched this demand, mainly by adding a focus on language pairs that differ with respect to the inventory of referential forms (e.g., displaying, or not, null objects) and to its discourse-appropriated distribution (Pérez-Leroux et al 2017). Previous research has observed that bilingual children acquiring a clitic language may show an extended null object stage (e.g., Pirvulescu et al 2014) and that they may also use pragmatically inadequate noun phrase objects for a longer period than monolingual children.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heritage Portuguese and Heritage Polish in Contact with German: More Evidence on the Production of Objects

2019

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This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.

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“…There is consistent support for the initial observation that bilingualism extends the clitic omission stage, even in the absence of transfer effects. Bilinguals omit more clitics than monolinguals when their other language is English (Pérez-Leroux, Pirvulescu & Roberge, 2009; Pirvulescu et al, 2014), a language lacking topic drop in which children produce object pronouns early (Pérez-Leroux et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vulnerability of clitics and articles to bilingual effects in typically developing Spanish–English bilingual children

et al. 2019

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This study examines bilingual effects in Spanish–English bilingual children with good maintenance of the minority language. The present study compares the performance of a group of Spanish-monolingual children (MON; n = 30) with two groups of Spanish-speaking bilingual children (Low English proficiency group: LEP; n = 36; High English proficiency group, HEP; n = 36) on the elicited productions of Spanish articles and object clitics. Our results suggest that children with LEP performed significantly lower than MON children of the same age on both articles and clitics in Spanish. However, children with HEP, who were a year older on average, performed similarly to the MON group. Both groups of bilingual children produced errors of clitic omission and substitution, but these errors were minimal in the MON group. The results suggest that Spanish clitics and articles are vulnerable to bilingual effects for English/Spanish speaking children with good Spanish maintenance.

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Direct Objects and Language Acquisition

Cited by 42 publications

References 192 publications

The Production of Clitic Pronouns: A Study on Bilingual and Monolingual Dyslexic Children

The Production of Clitic Pronouns: A Study on Bilingual and Monolingual Dyslexic Children

Heritage Portuguese and Heritage Polish in Contact with German: More Evidence on the Production of Objects

Vulnerability of clitics and articles to bilingual effects in typically developing Spanish–English bilingual children

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