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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]
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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

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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.

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