Chapter 10
Null subjects in the early acquisition of English by child heritage speakers of Spanish
This paper investigates the development of English and Spanish subject production in 8 heritage bilingual children (age range: 4;1–5;3; mean age: 4;7). Oral production of overt and null subjects was assessed using a picture-based story re-telling task and a description task. Subjects were coded according to type (overt or null), and pragmatic function (new information, topic continuation, recovery, contrast and change of topic). Results indicate a robust distribution of pragmatically appropriate subjects in Spanish; however, non adult-like null subjects were also found in a subset of the English utterances. We propose that cross-linguistic influence from Spanish encouraged children to have more than one grammar available (Amaral & Roeper 2014), with the option to treat English as a null-subject language.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Analyzing null and overt subjects
- 2.1Verbal morphology and the distinction between null and overt subject languages
- 2.2Pragmatic conditions on null and overt subjects in Spanish
- 3.Early acquisition of null and overt subjects
- 4.The present study
- 4.1Participants
- 4.2Methodology
- 5.Results
- 6.Discussion and implications for future studies
- 6.1Analysis
- 6.2Dominance and functionality as key factors influencing CLI
- 6.3Implications for future studies
-
Notes
-
References
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Goldin, Michele
2020.
An Exploratory Study of the Effect of Spanish Immersion Education on the Acquisition of Pronominal Subjects in Child Heritage Speakers.
Languages 5:2
► pp. 18 ff.
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