Larisa Avram

A cross-linguistic study of the acquisition of clitic and pronoun production

ABSTRACT This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”), thus establishing a robust cross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for 5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results, indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to select a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as well as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production of pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who at age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for language impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a developmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain cross-linguistic differences discussed in the article.

An asymmetry in the acquisition of accusative clitics in child Romanian

In spite of the fact that the distinction between 1st/2nd and 3rd person pronouns has been acknowledged in the literature for a long time (Benveniste 1966; Postal 1966) most studies dealing with accusative clitics chose to focus on what these pronominals had in common – defi ciency and distribution – irrespective of their person value. This focus in the theoretical literature had an immediate resonance in the domain of acquisition. Most studies which analysed the development of accusative clitics on the basis of longitudinal data did not make any (explicit) difference between 1st/2nd vs. 3rd person, while those relying on experimental data looked exclusively at 3rd person accusative clitics.1 Among the few theoretical studies which explicitly address the differences between 1st/2nd vs. 3rd person in the domain of defi cient pronominals is Kayne (2000). The main claim is that in French and Italian 1st/2nd person accusative clitics (mand t-) belong to a natural class which excludes 3rd person accusative clitics (l-) but which includes the refl exive clitic s-. According to Kayne, only 3rd person non-refl exive accusative clitics are determiner-pronouns (D-pronouns). Similarly, Uriagereka (1995) argues that 3rd person clitics alone are of category D, whereas 1st/2nd person clitics are DPs. He also notices that refl exive se might belong to a category different from D (p. 85).

How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe

The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 different languages, and 7 language (sub-)families. The study investigated the effects of two factors on question formation: (a) whether the question contains a simple interrogative word like ‘who’ or a complex one like ‘which princess’, and (b) whether the question word was related to the sentential subject or object position of the verb. The findings show that there is considerable variation among languages, but the two factors mentioned consistently affect children’s performance. The cross-linguistic variation shows that three linguistic factors facilitate children’s understanding of questions: having overt case morphology, having a single lexical item for both ‘who’ and ‘which’, and the use of synthetic verbal forms.