Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T09:07:49.159Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bilingualism as a window into the language faculty: The acquisition of objects in French-speaking children in bilingual and monolingual contexts*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2009

ANA T. PÉREZ-LEROUX ,
MIHAELA PIRVULESCU  and
YVES ROBERGE
ANA T. PÉREZ-LEROUX*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
MIHAELA PIRVULESCU
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
YVES ROBERGE
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
*
Address for correspondence: A.T. Pérez-Leroux, University of Toronto, Victoria College, 73 Queen's Park Crescent, Toronto, Ontario, M5J 1K7, Canada[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 97 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We would like to thank I. Belzil, S. Carroll, F. Genesee, J. Meisel, N. Müller, D. Thomas, the audience at Conference on Language Acquisition and Bilingualism: Consequences for a multilingual society, York University and three anonymous reviewers for Bilingualism, for useful comments and discussion. This research was funded in part by SSHRC grant (410-05-0239) to the authors.

References

Authier, J.-M. (1992). A parametric account of V-governed arbitrary null arguments. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 10, 345–374.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chierchia, G. (1998). Reference to kinds across languages. Natural Language Semantics, 6, 339–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chierchia, G., Guasti, M. T. & Gualmini, A. (1999). Nouns and articles in child grammar and the syntax/semantics map. Ms., University of Milano-Bicocca & University of Maryland.Google Scholar
Costa, A., La Heij, W. & Navarrete, E. (2006). The dynamics of bilingual lexical access. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9 (2), 137–151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cummins, S. & Roberge, Y. (2005). A modular account of null objects in French. Syntax, 8, 44–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Cat, C. & Plunkett, B. (2002). ‘QU’ est ce qu’ i(l) dit, celui+Là? Notes méthodologiques sur la transcription d'un corpus francophone. In Pusch, C. D. & Raible, W. (eds.), Romanistische Korpuslinguistik: Korpora und gesprochene Sprache/Romance corpus linguistics: Corpora and spoken language (ScriptOralia 126). Tübingen: Narr. [CD-rom.]Google Scholar
Dobrovie-Sorin, C. (1998). Impersonal se constructions in Romance and the passivization of unergatives. Linguistic Inquiry, 29, 399–437.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Döpke, S. (1998). Competing language structures: The acquisition of verb placement by bilingual German–English children. Journal of Child Language, 25, 555–584.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Döpke, S. (2000). Generation of and retraction from crosslinguistically motivated structures in bilingual first language acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3 (3), 209–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, J. & Sakas, W. (2005). The subset principle in syntax: The cost of compliance. Journal of Linguistics, 41, 513–569.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gavarrò, A., Pérez-Leroux, A. T. & Roeper, T. (2006). Definite and bare noun contrasts in child Catalan. In Torrens, V. & Escobar, L. (eds.), The acquisition of syntax in Romance languages, pp. 51–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gawlitzek-Maiwald, I. & Tracy, R. (1996). Bilingual bootstrapping. Linguistics, 34 (5), 901–926.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Genesee, F. (1989). Early bilingual development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language, 16, 161–179.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gillon, B. (2006). English relational words, context sensitivity and implicit arguments. Ms., McGill University.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L., Cassidy, K., Nappa, R., Papafragou, A. & Trueswell, J. C. (2005). Hard words. Language Learning and development, 1 (1), 23–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, A. (2001). Patient arguments of causative verbs can be omitted: The role of information structure in argument distribution. Language Science, 23, 503–524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grüter, T. (2006). Object clitics and null objects in the acquisition of French. Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University.Google Scholar
Guasti, M. T., de Lange, J., Gavarró, A. & Caprin, C. (2004). Article omission: Across child languages and across special registers. In van Kampen, J. & Baauw, S. (eds.), Proceedings of GALA 2003 (LOT Occasional Series 1), pp. 199–210. Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar
Hale, K. & Keyser, S. J. (2002). Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heim, I. (1991). Artikel und Definitheit. In von Stechow, A. & Wunderlich, D. (eds.), Semantik: Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, pp. 487–535. Berlin: de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingham, R. (1993/1994). Input and learnability: Direct object omissibility in English. Language Acquisition, 3, 95–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakobson, R. (1968). Child language, aphasia, and phonological universals. The Hague: Mouton. [Original published as Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1941.]CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakubowicz, C., Nash, L., Rigaut, C. & Gérard, C. L. (1998). Determiners and clitic pronouns in French-speaking children with SLI. Language Acquisition, 7, 113–160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakubowicz, C. & Rigaut, C. (2000). L'acquisition des clitiques nominatifs et des clitiques objets en français. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 45, 119–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jiang, N. (2004). Morphological insensitivity in second language processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25 (4), 603–634.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroll, J. F., Bobb, S. C. & Wodniecka, Z. (2006). Language selectivity is the exception, not the rule: Arguments against a fixed locus of language selection. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9 (2), 119–135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroll, J. F., Sumutka, B. M. & Schwarts, A. I. (2005). A cognitive view of the bilingual lexicon: Reading and speaking words in two languages. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9 (1), 27–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kupisch, T. (2006a). The acquisition of determiners in bilingual German–Italian and German–French children. Munich: Lincom-Europa.Google Scholar
Kupisch, T. (2006b). The emergence of article forms and functions in a German–Italian bilingual child. In Lleó, C. (ed.), Interfaces in multilingualism: Acquisition, representation and processing, pp. 45–109. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Kupisch, T. (2007). Determiners in bilingual German–Italian children: What they tell us about the relation between language influence and language dominance. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10 (1), 57–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, K. & Lemoine, K. (1996). Vers une grammaire des compléments zéro en français parlé. In Chuquet, J. & Frid, M. (eds.), Absence de marques et représentation de l'absence, pp. 279–309. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.Google Scholar
Larjavaara, M. (2000). Présence ou absence de l'objet. Limites du possible en français contemporain. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica.Google Scholar
Lebeaux, D. (1988). Language acquisition and the form of grammar. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Legate, J. A. & Yang, C. (2005) Morphosyntactic learning and the development of tense. Ms., University of Delaware & Yale University.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A. & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lleó, C. & Demuth, K. (1999). Prosodic constraints on the emergence of grammatical morphemes: Crosslinguistic evidence from Germanic and Romance languages. In Greenhill, A., Littlefield, H. & Tano, Ch. (eds.), Proceedings of Boston University Conference on Language Development 31 (vol. 2), pp. 407–418. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Lleó, C., Kuchenbrandt, I., Kehoe, M. & Trujillo, C. (2003). Syllable final consonants in Spanish and German monolingual and bilingual acquisition. In Müller, (ed.), pp. 191–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loebell, H. & Bock, K. (2003). Structural priming across languages. Linguistics, 41, 791–824.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd edn., vol. 2): The database. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (1986). Word order and case marking in early child language. Evidence from simultaneous acquisition of two first languages: French and German. Linguistics, 24, 123–183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (1989). Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In Hyltenstam, K. & Obler, L. (eds.), Bilingualism across the lifespan: Acquisition, maturity and loss, pp. 13–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (2001). The simultaneous acquisition of two first languages: Early differentiation and subsequent development of grammars. In Cenoz, J., & Genesee, F. (eds.), Trends in bilingual acquisition, pp. 11–41. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (2007a). On autonomous syntactic development in multiple first language acquisition. In Caunt-Nulton, H., Kulatilake, S. & Woo, I., Proceedings of Boston University Conference on Language Development 31 (vol. 1), pp. 25–45. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (2007b). The weaker language in early child bilingualism: Acquiring a first language as a second language? Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 495–514.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merlo, P. & Stevenson, S. (2001). Automatic verb classification based on statistical distributions of argument structure. Computational Linguistics, 27, 373–408.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, K. (2006). Variable input and the acquisition of plurality in two varieties of Spanish. Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University.Google Scholar
Miller, N. A. & Kroll, J. F. (2002). Stroop effects in bilingual translation. Memory & Cognition, 30 (4), 614–628.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Müller, N. (ed.) (2003). (In)Vulnerable domains in language acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Müller, N., Crysmann, B. & Kaiser, G. A. (1996). Interactions between the acquisition of French object drop and the development of the C-system. Language Acquisition, 5, 35–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, N. & Hulk, A. (2001). Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicoladis, E. (2002). What's the difference between “toilet paper” and “paper toilet”? French–English bilingual children's crosslinguistic transfer in compound nouns. Journal of Child Language, 29, 1–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paradis, J. (2001) Do bilingual two-year-olds have separate phonological systems? International Journal of Bilingualism, 5 (1), 19–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J., Crago, M. & Genesee, F. (2005/2006). Domain-general versus domain-specific accounts of Specific Language Impairment: Evidence from bilingual children’ acquisition of object pronouns. Language Acquisition, 13 (1), 33–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. & Genesee, F. (1996). Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or interdependent? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearson, B. & Fernández, S. (1994). Patterns of interaction in the lexical growth in two languages of bilingual infants and toddlers. Language Learning, 44 (4), 617–653.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearson, B., Fernández, S. & Oller, D. K. (1993). Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norm. Language Learning, 43 (1), 93–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Pirvulescu, M. & Roberge, Y. (2006). Early object omission in child French and English. In Montreuil, J.-P. & Nishida, C. (eds.), New perspectives in Romance linguistics, pp. 213–218. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Pirvulescu, M. & Roberge, Y. (to appear). A syntactic transitivity approach to null objects in child language. Lingua.Google Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Pirvulescu, M., Roberge, Y., Tieu, L. & Thomas, D. (2006). Variable input and object drop in child language. In Gurski, C. & Radisic, M. (eds.), Proceedings of the 2006 Canadian Linguistics Association Annual Conference. http://ling.uwo.ca/publications/CLA2006/Perez-Leroux_etal.pdf (retrieved 6 November 2008).Google Scholar
Pickering, M. J. & Branigan, H. P. (1998). The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 633–651.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pirvulescu, M. (2006). The acquisition of object clitics in French L1: Spontaneous vs. elicited production. In Belletti, A., Bennati, E., Chesi, C., DiDomenico, E. & Ferrari, I. (eds.), Proceedings of GALA 2005, pp. 450–462. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.Google Scholar
Pupier, P. (1981). Les relations entre la phonologie d'enfants de deux ans et celle des adultes dans le français de Montréal. In Gagné, G. & Pagé, M. (eds.), Études sur la langue parlée des enfants québécois 1969–1980, pp. 161–172. Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal.Google Scholar
Roeper, T. (1999). Universal bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2, 169–186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sachs, J. (1983). Talking about the there and then: The emergence of displaced reference in parent–child discourse. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language (vol. 4), pp. 1–28. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Salamoura, A. & Williams, J. (2006). Lexical activation of cross-language syntactic priming. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9 (3), 299–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaeffer, J. (1997). Direct object scrambling and clitic placemen in Dutch and Italian child language. Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA.Google Scholar
Serratrice, L., Sorace, A. & Paoli, S. (2004). Crosslinguistic influence at the syntax–pragmatics interface: Subjects and objects in English–Italian bilingual and monolingual acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7, 183–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sportiche, D. (1992). Clitic constructions. In Rooryck, J. & Zaring, L. (eds.), Phrase structure and the lexicon, pp. 213–276. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Sportiche, D. (1998). Partitions and atoms of clause structure. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Statistics Canada. (2001). Census report 2001. http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/Products/Analytic/companion/lang/highlights.cfm (retrieved 6 November 2008).Google Scholar
Unsworth, S. (2003). Testing Hulk & Müller (2000) on crosslinguistic influence: Root Infinitives in a bilingual German/English child. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6 (2), 143–158.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Der Velde, M., Jakubowicz, C. & Rigaut, C. (2002). The acquisition of determiners and pronominal clitics by three French-speaking children. Proceedings of GALA 1999, pp. 115–132. Berlin: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Yang, C. (2002). Knowledge and learning in natural language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar