Bilingual acquisition of object clitics in Romanian and Italian

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Paper in conference proceeding

Abstract

Object clitics (OCL) have been shown to be acquired differently with respect to their placement in monolingual and bilingual speakers. Previous studies have mainly focused on Romance-Germanic bilinguals (see Hamann & Belletti 2006; Granfeldt 2012), but this paper is based on Italian-Romanian bilinguals. 27 children, aged 4-9, 16 in Italy and 11 in Romania, were exposed to an elicited production task for 3rd pers. direct OCL pronouns in Romanian and Italian. In accordance with previous studies on OCL in bilingual acquisition, the children produced OCLs, omitting and/or replacing them sometimes with full lexical NPs and sometimes misplaced them,. However, we found also gender errors and tense/mood switches, in both Italian and Romanian, related to the placement of OCL in Romanian. Our results suggest that the bilingual acquisition of OCL is different dependent on which languages are involved.

Details

Authors
Organisations
Research areas and keywords

Subject classification (UKÄ) – MANDATORY

  • Specific Languages

Keywords

  • object clitics, misplacement, acquisition, bilingual, L2, heritage, language
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationStructure, Use, and Meaning in Intercultural Settings
PublisherEditura Universitatii Transilvania din Brasov
Pages17-30
ISBN (Print)978-606-19-0466-2
Publication statusPublished - 2014
Publication categoryResearch
Peer-reviewedYes
Event3rd International Conference on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics: Structure, Use, and Meaning in Intercultural Settings - Brasov, Romania
Duration: 2014 Sep 20 → 2014 Sep 21

Conference

Conference3rd International Conference on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics: Structure, Use, and Meaning in Intercultural Settings
CountryRomania
CityBrasov
Period2014/09/20 → 2014/09/21