Our objective is to shed light on recursion through an exploration of the L1 development of four DP structures in English. Since recursion is in narrow syntax, there is no reason to expect asymmetries between constructions but specific formal differences between structures might make acquisition… read more
We investigate the effect of French clitic construction on verb learning. In French, object pronouns precede the verb, and the canonical direct object position remains empty. We test whether children treat such contexts as input for transitivity (since a direct object is morphologically… read more
A common assumption in the field of bilingual acquisition is that while bilinguals might have separate language representations, the languages can also influence one another. Previous studies on object (clitic) omission consider a combination of null argument and non-null argument languages, and… read more
We examine the syntactic nature of object omissions in child language with a study comparing French and English-speaking children’s elicited production. We adopt a theoretical approach to transitivity where interactions between modules of the grammar create a rich and flexible system of null… read more
