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The phenomenon of object omission in child L2 French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2006

PHILIPPE PRÉVOST
PHILIPPE PRÉVOST
Affiliation:
Laval University
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Abstract

This paper investigates object omission in French longitudinal production from two English-speaking children (Lightbown, 1977). Similar patterns of object omission are observed: direct objects start being dropped as transitive verbs are emerging and licit and illicit null objects occur in all recordings thereafter. Moreover, the incidence of illicit null objects drops at about the same time in both children (month 20), which corresponds to the moment object clitics start being used productively and to the end of the root infinitive period (Prévost, 1997). I argue that object omission is an instance of clitic-drop and is related to processing difficulties. In particular, both the projection of full-fledged representations and the production of object clitics (which occupy non-canonical object positions in French) increase computational complexity for children. Object-drop in child L2 French does not seem to be affected by L1 transfer nor to be related to significant difficulties with properties at the syntax/pragmatics interface.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , November 2006 , pp. 263 - 280
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2006

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Footnotes

This research was supported by FQRSC grant 2001-ER-66973, which is gratefully acknowledged. I thank Aurora Bel, Sarah Cummins, Lourdes Diáz, Mihaela Pirvulescu and Yves Roberge for useful comments and suggestions, as well as audiences at the 22nd International Conference of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics and at the Second Lisbon Meeting on Language Acquisition.