On the direction of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of
object clitics in French and Italian
Placement errors of object clitics (OCL) in French have been documented in 2L1
and L2 but not in L1 acquisition (Granfeldt,
2012; Hamann & Belletti,
2006). In the present study, we investigate whether placement errors
of third person singular OCLs may be due to cross-linguistic influence. We
exposed bilingual children (successive L1 French/L2 Italian and L1 Italian/L2 French and
simultaneous 2L1 Italian/French) to an OCL elicitation task.
The results showed significant differences between the 2L1 and L2 groups in
comparison with the L1 groups, and between the languages, thus corroborating the
findings of previous studies. Production accuracy of OCLs in general was highest
in L1, and higher in Italian than in French. However, OCL placement errors were
found in 2L1 French and L2 Italian as well as in the L1 French of children who
had Italian as L2. These findings suggest that cross-linguistic influence is
bidirectional (Foroodi-Nejad & Paradis,
2009; Chenjie Gu, 2010;
Nicoladis, 1999). We discuss
these results in relation to the proposal that cross-linguistic influence should
occur only in one direction, i.e. only in one language, and only under certain
conditions (Hulk & Müller, 2000;
Müller & Hulk, 2001).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The placement of third person direct object clitics in Italian and French
- 3.Previous studies on the placement of OCLs in French and Italian
- 3.1French
- 3.2Italian
- 3.3Cross-linguistic influence: unidirectional or bidirectional?
- 4.Methodology
- 4.1Participants
- 4.2The elicitation task
- 5.Results
- 5.1General accuracy in the production of OCLs in French and Italian
- 5.2Placement errors
- 6.Summary and discussion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
This article is currently available as a sample article.
References
Argyri, E.
(
2003)
Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition. Ms. University of Edinburgh.
Argyri, E. & Sorace, A.
(
2007)
Cross-linguistic influence and language dominance in older bilingual children.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 101, 77–99.
Authier, J. -M., & Reed, L.
(
2007)
On the transparency effects in French. In
P. J. Masullo,
E. O’Rourke, &
C. H. Huang (Eds.),
Romance linguistics 2007: Selected papers from the 37th linguistic symposium on Romance languages (pp. 37–51). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Belletti, A.
(
1999)
Italian/Romance clitics: Structure and derivation. In
H. van Riemsdijk (Ed.),
Clitics in the languages of Europe (pp. 543–579). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Belletti, A., & Hamann, C.
Bennati, E., & Matteini, S.
(
2006)
Object clitic climbing in L2 learners of Italian. In
A. Belletti,
E. Bennati,
C. Chesi,
E. di Domenico, &
I. Ferrari (Eds.),
Language acquisition and development. Proceedings of GALA 2005 (pp. 35–48). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Bortolato, M.
(
2003)
On the acquisition of clitic prounouns. An experimental investigation, Tesi di Laurea. Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia (supervised by
A. Cardinaletti &
M. T. Guasti).
Cardinaletti, A.
(
2004)
L’italiano contemporaneo: Cambiamento in atto e competenza dei parlanti. In
A. Cardinaletti &
F. Frasnedi (Eds.),
Intorno all’italiano contemporaneo. Tra linguistica e didattica (pp. 49–75). Milan: Franco Angeli.
Cardinaletti, A., & Shlonsky, U.
(
2004)
Clitic positions and restructuring in Italian.
Linguistic Inquiry, 351, 519–557.
Cardinaletti, A., & Starke, M.
(
1994)
The typology of structural deficiency.
University of Venice Working Papers in Linguistics, 41, 41–109.
Cardinaletti, A., & Starke, M.
(
1999)
The typology of structural deficiency: A case study of the three classes of pronouns. In
H. van Riemsdijk (Ed.),
Clitics in the languages of Europe (pp. 145–233). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gu, C.
(
2010)
Cross-linguistic influence in two directions: The acquisition of dative constructions in Cantonese-English bilingual children.
International Journal of Bilingualism, 141, 87–103.
Chini, M.
(
1995)
Genere grammaticale e acquisizione. Aspetti della morfologia nominale dell’italiano L2. Pavia: Franco Angeli.
Ferrari, I.
(
2006)
On the status of object clitics in Italian by two German/Italian bilingual children. In
A. Belletti,
E. Bennati,
C. Chesi,
E. di Domenico, &
I. Ferrari (Eds.),
Language acquisition and development. Proceedings of GALA 2005 (pp. 173–183). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Foroodi-Nejad, F., & Paradis, J.
(
2009)
Crosslinguistic transfer in the acquisition of compound words in Persian – English bilinguals.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 121, 411–427.
Granfeldt, J. & Schlyter, S.
Grüter, T.
(
2006)
Object clitics and null objects in the acquisition of French. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. McGill, Montreal.
Hamann, C., & Belletti, A.
(
2006)
Developmental patterns in the acquisition of complement clitic pronouns. Comparing different acquisition modes with an emphasis on French.
Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, 311, 39–78.
Hill, V., & Pirvulescu, M.
(
2012)
French object clitics, L1 and the left periphery. In
S. Ferré,
P. Prévost,
L. Tuller &
R. Zebib (Eds.),
Selected proceedings of the Romance turn IV: Workshop on the acquisition of Romance languages, (pp. 169–189). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Hulk, A.
(
2000)
L’acquisition des pronoms clitiques français par un enfant bilingue français-néerlandais / The acquisition of French clitics by a French-Dutch bilingual child.
The Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 451, 97–117.
Hulk, A., & Müller, N.
(
2000)
Bilingual first language acquisition at the interface between syntax and pragmatics.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 31, 227–244.
Jakubowicz, C., Müller, N., Riemer, B., & C. Rigaut
(
1997)
The case of subject and object omissions in French and German. In
E. Hughes,
M. Hughes, &
A. Greenhill (Eds.),
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 331–342). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Kellerman, E.
(
1979)
Transfer and non-transfer: Where we are now? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21, 37–57.
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, 101, 57–78.
Landow, N.
(
2002)
L’acquisition des clitiques objets en français langue étrangère, Mémoire de Licence, University of Geneva.
Leonini, C.
(
2006)
Object clitics and determiners in the acquisition of Italian as L1 and L2. In
A. Belletti,
E. Bennati,
C. Chesi,
E. di Domenico, &
I. Ferrari (Eds.),
Language acquisition and development. Proceedings of GALA 2005 (pp. 343–348). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Leonini, C., & Belletti, A.
(
2004)
Adult L2 Acquisition of Italian clitic pronouns and ‘Subject inversion’/VS structures. In
J. van Kampen, &
S. Bauw (Eds.),
Proceedings of GALA 2003 (pp. 293–304). Utrecht: LOT.
Liceras, J. M., & Alba de la Fuente, A.
(
2015)
Typological proximity in L2 acquisition. The Spanish non-native grammar of French speakers. In
T. Judy &
S. Perpiñán (Eds.),
The acquisition of Spanish in understudied language pairings issues in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics (pp. 329–358). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Müller, N.
(
1998)
Transfer in bilingual first language acquisition.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11, 151–171.
Müller, N.
(Ed.) (
2003)
Introduction. In
N. Müller (Ed.),
(In)vulnerable domains in multilingualism (pp. vii–xiv). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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, 51, 35–63.
Müller, N., & Hulk, A.
(
2001)
Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 41, 1–21.
Müller, N., Schmitz, K., Cantone, K., & Kupisch, T.
Nicoladis, E.
(
1999)
“Where is my brush-teeth?” Acquisition of compound nouns in a French-English bilingual child.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 21, 245–256.
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, 291, 843–863.
Paradis, J., & Genesee, F.
(
1996)
Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or interdependent? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 181, 1–25.
Rizzi, L.
(
1982)
Issues in Italian Syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
Seuren, P. A. M.
(
2009)
The clitics mechanism in French and Italian.
Probus, 211, 83–142.
Schlyter, S.
(
1993)
The weaker language in bilingual Swedish-French children. In
K. Hyltenstam &
Å. Viberg (Eds.),
Progression and regression in language: Sociocultural, neuropsychological and linguistic perspectives (pp. 289–308). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schmitz, K.
(
2006)
Zweisprachigkeit im Fokus. Der Erwerb der Verben mit zwei Objekten durch bilingual deutch-französisch und deutch-italienisch aufwachsende Kinder. Tübingen: Narr.
Schmitz, K., & Müller, N.
(
2008)
Strong and clitic pronouns in monolingual and bilingual acquisition of French and Italian.
Bilingualism, Language & Cognition, 111, 19–41.
Vender, M., Garraffa, M., Sorace, A., & Guasti, M. T.
(
2016)
How early L2 children perform on Italian clinical markers of SLI: A study of clitic production and nonword repetition,
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 301, 150–169.
Yip, V., & Matthews, S.
(
2007)
The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Kaibao, Hu & Muhammad Afzaal
2024.
The translation teaching platform based on multilingual corpora of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China: Design, resources and applications.
Acta Psychologica 242
► pp. 104110 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.