Mihaela Pirvulescu

Bilingualism as a Window into the Language Faculty: The Acquisition of Objects in French-Speaking Children in Bilingual and Monolingual Contexts.

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.

Bilingual effects: exploring object omission in pronominal languages

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 Acquisition of Past Participle Agreement in Québec French L1

Much developmental work has been devoted to the acquisition of object clitics in French. There is a consensus that in early grammar, children omit object clitics in contexts where an adult would not. Several analyses have been put forth, among which, one proposing a close link between the omission of object clitics and the presence of past participle agreement. In this short article we address this hypothesis by examining the acquisition of past participle agreement through two sentence-preference tasks administered to children (3- to 5-year-olds divided into three age groups) and adults from the Montréal area. The results of the experiments show that past participle agreement is a marginal feature in early grammar and therefore too weak to be considered as controlling the realization of the direct object clitics in child production. Children and adults display different behavior with respect to past participle agreement (weak and optional) versus subject-verb agreement (consistently strong and obligatory). This result points toward an analysis of past participle agreement in terms of language-specific optional verb movement.

Topicalization and object omission in child language

This article offers a closer look at the relationship between object omission in child language and the acquisition of object clitics. The study isolates a context in French where the use of an object clitic is not only possible, or optimal, but mostly obligatory in the adult grammar, namely the clitic left-dislocation context. In addition, the article contrasts French with English, a language that requires a null element in a similar context, topicalization. By exploring the topicalization structures, the study separates the acquisition of object clitics from object omission phenomena. The results confirm those obtained from other experimental methods and from naturalistic observation: French children, in contrast to adults, uniformly prefer null objects across different domains; they continue to do so even in a syntactically triggered context such as clitic left-dislocation. Thus, the article provides evidence for a null object stage in child acquisition independent of the parametric settings of the target language.

Object Clitic Omission in French-Speaking Children: Effects of the Elicitation Task.

In French, the acquisition of object clitics seems delayed, and omissions are documented. In this article, we look at the experimental paradigm traditionally used to elicit object clitics and propose a new elicitation procedure that is closer to how clitics are produced in spontaneous production. We show that under the proposed new experiment, the results in elicited production align with those in spontaneous production, and omission of object clitics is minimal. We briefly outline the implications for the analysis of the omission phenomenon.

Agreement Paradigms across Moods and Tenses: The Case of Romanian Subjunctives and Imperatives

This article argues that the realization of agreement in subjunctive and imperative verbs is a consequence of the syntactic status of Tense in these two moods. Crucially, certain agreement paradigms across Romance languages show very a close resemblance: the subjunctive and imperative paradigms are identical, in most cases, to the indicative paradigms. Systematically, moods such as the subjunctive and the imperative do not show specific tense affixes or specific tense-induced allomorphy on their agreement affixes. The proposal is illustrated with Romanian verbal agreement, which is analyzedwithin the DistributedMorphology framework. The analysis shows that tense information is not used in subjunctive and imperative agreement morphology, unless it is exactly the same information as in another paradigm—the present indicative. It is proposed that at the syntactic level, Tense is unspecified in the subjunctive and absent in the imperative, and that the realization of agreement affixes is a consequence of this syntactic representation.