Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T10:42:59.122Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Object clitics and their omission in child L2 French: The contributions of processing limitations and L1 transfer*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2011

THERES GRÜTER  and
MARTHA CRAGO
THERES GRÜTER*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
MARTHA CRAGO
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
*
Address for correspondence: Theres Grüter, Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, 1890 East-West Road, Honolulu, HI 96822, USAtheres@hawaii.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores the widely documented difficulty with object clitics in the acquisition of French. The study investigates the effects of L1 transfer and processing limitations on the production and comprehension of object clitics in child L2 learners of French with different L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Spanish). The Spanish-speaking learners performed better than Chinese-speaking learners on clitic-related tasks, indicating a facilitative effect of transfer when the L1 also has object clitics. Yet no evidence was found for (negative) transfer of null objects from Chinese to French, as learners consistently rejected interpretations requiring referential null objects on a receptive task. The frequency of Chinese-speaking learners’ object omissions in production was negatively correlated with an independent measure of working memory (backward digit span), consistent with the hypothesis that object clitic omission is affected by processing limitations. These findings are discussed within a psycholinguistic model of syntactic encoding during language production.

Keywords

object cliticsnull objectsworking memorytransfertree-adjoining grammar
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , July 2012 , pp. 531 - 549
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Andréanne Gagné, Mariana Nuñez, Chen Qu, and Monika Szpak for their invaluable assistance with participant recruitment and testing, and Carole Bélanger, Lucas Champollion, Adriana Weisleder, the audiences of the 7th International Symposium on Bilingualism at Utrecht University and the 34th Boston University Conference on Language Development, as well as the anonymous reviewers for BLC for their many helpful comments at various stages of this study. This research was conducted while both authors were affiliated with l'Université de Montréal. The project was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to Theres Grüter, and a FQRSC team grant to Lydia White, Martha Crago and colleagues, for which we are grateful.

References

Abeillé, A. (1992). Synchronous TAGs and French pronominal clitics. Actes de COLING-92, 60–66. Nantes, August 23–28. http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/C/C92/C92-1013.pdf, retrieved September 9, 2011.Google Scholar
Adiv, E. (1984). Language learning strategies: The relationship between L1 operating principles and language transfer in L2 development. In Andersen, R. (ed.), Second languages: A crosslinguistic perspective, pp. 125–142. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.Google Scholar
Bedore, L. M., & Leonard, L. B. (2001). Grammatical morphology deficits in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44, 905–924.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Belletti, A., & Hamann, C. (2004). On the L2/bilingual acquisition of French by two young children with different source languages. In Prévost & Paradis (eds.), pp. 147–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bleam, T. (2000). Clitic climbing and the power of Tree Adjoining Grammar. In Abeillé, A. & Rambow, O. (eds.), Tree adjoining grammars: Formalisms, linguistic analysis and processing, pp. 193–220. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Bock, J. K., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1995). Language production: Grammatical encoding. In Gernsbacher, M. (ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics, pp. 945–984. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bottari, P., Cipriani, P., & Chilosi, A. M. (2000). Dissociations in the acquisition of clitic pronouns by dysphasic children: A case study from Italian. In Powers, S. M. & Hamann, C. (eds.), The acquisition of scrambling and cliticization, pp. 237–277. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Castilla, A., & Pérez-Leroux, A. T. (2010). Omissions and substitutions in Spanish object clitics: Developmental optionality as a property of the representational system. Language Acquisition, 17, 2–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H. (ed.) (1996). Generative perspectives on language acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clements, J. C. (2006). Null direct objects in Spanish. In Clements, J. C. & Yoon, J. (eds.), Functional approaches to Spanish syntax, pp. 134–150. New York: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Costa, J., & Lobo, M. (2009). Clitic omission in the acquisition of European Portuguese: Data from comprehension. In Pires, A. & Rothman, J. (eds.), Minimalist inquiries into child language acquisition: Case studies across Portuguese, pp. 63–84. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crain, S., & McKee, C. (1985). The acquisition of structural restrictions on anaphora. In Berman, S., Choe, J. & McDonough, J. (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 15, pp. 94–110. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, GLSA.Google Scholar
Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing, and modularity. In Clifton, C., Frazier, L. & Rayner, K. (eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing, pp. 443–467. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (1998). Investigations in Universal Grammar: A guide to experiments on the acquisition of syntax and semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cummins, S., & Roberge, Y. (2005). A modular account of null objects in French. Syntax, 8, 44–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duffield, N., White, L., Bruhn de Garavito, J., Montrul, S., & Prévost, P. (2002). Clitic placement in L2 French: Evidence from sentence matching. Journal of Linguistics, 38, 487–525.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferreira, F. (2000). Syntax in language production: An approach using tree-adjoining grammars. In Wheeldon, L. (ed.), Aspects of language production, pp. 291–330. Hove: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Fónagy, I. (1985). J'aime, je connais: verbes transitifs à object latent. Revue Romane, 20, 3–35.Google Scholar
Frank, R. (2002). Phrase structure composition and syntactic dependencies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frank, R. (2006). Phase theory and Tree Adjoining Grammar. Lingua, 116, 145–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
French, L. M., & O'Brien, I. (2008). Phonological memory and children's second language grammar learning. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 463–487.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, S. E., Pickering, S. J., Ambridge, B., & Wearing, H. (2004). The structure of working memory from 4 to 15 years of age. Developmental Psychology, 40, 177–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gauthier, K., Genesee, F., & Kasparian, K. (2011). Acquisition of complement clitics and tense morphology in internationally-adopted children acquiring French. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, doi:10.1017/ S1366728910000635. Published by Cambridge University Press 2011, September 6, 2011.Google Scholar
Granfeldt, J., & Schlyter, S. (2004). Cliticisation in the acquisition of French as L1 and L2. In Prévost & Paradis (eds.), pp. 333–370.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grüter, T. (2005). Comprehension and production of French object clitics by child second language learners and children with Specific Language Impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26, 363–391.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grüter, T. (2006a). Object clitics and null objects in the acquisition of French. Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University, Montreal.Google Scholar
Grüter, T. (2006b). Object (clitic) omission in L2 French: Mis-setting or missing surface inflection? In Grantham, M. O'Brien, Shea, C. & Archibald, J. (eds.), Proceedings of the 8th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2006), pp. 63–71). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. [www.lingref.com, document #1488]Google Scholar
Grüter, T. (2009). A unified account of object clitics and referential null objects in French. Syntax, 12 (3), 215–241.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grüter, T., Lieberman, M., & Gualmini, A. (2010). Acquiring the scope of disjunction and negation in L2: A bidirectional study of learners of Japanese and English. Language Acquisition, 17, 127–154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gualmini, A., & Schwarz, B. (2009). Solving learnability problems in the acquisition of semantics. Journal of Semantics, 26, 185–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamann, C., & Belletti, A. (2006). Developmental patterns in the acquisition of complement clitic pronouns: Comparing different acquisition modes with an emphasis on French. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, 31, 39–78.Google Scholar
Hamann, C., Rizzi, L., & Frauenfelder, U. (1996). On the acquisition of subject and object clitics in French. In Clahsen (ed.), pp. 309–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herschensohn, J. (2004). Functional categories and the acquisition of object clitics in L2 French. In Prévost & Paradis (eds.), pp. 207–242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopp, H. (2010). Ultimate attainment in L2 inflection: Performance similarities between non-native and native speakers. Lingua, 120, 901–931.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huang, C.-T. J. (1984). On the distribution and reference of empty pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry, 15, 531–574.Google Scholar
Jakubowicz, C. (2003). Computational complexity and the acquisition of functional categories by French-speaking children with SLI. Linguistics, 41 (2), 175–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakubowicz, C., & Nash, L. (2003). Why accusative clitics are avoided in normal and impaired language development. Ms., Université Paris 8-CNRS.Google Scholar
Jakubowicz, C., Nash, L., Rigaut, C., & Gérard, C. (1998). Determiners and clitic pronouns in French-speaking children with SLI. Language Acquisition, 7, 113–160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakubowicz, C., & Rigaut, C. (2000). L'acquisition des clitiques nominatifs et des clitiques objets en français. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 45 (1/2), 119–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joshi, A. K., Levy, L., & Takahashi, M. (1975). Tree adjunct grammars. Journal of the Computer and System Sciences, 10 (1), 136–163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joshi, A. K., & Schabes, Y. (1997). Tree-adjoining grammars. In Rozenberg, G. & Salomaa, A. (eds.), Handbook of formal languages, pp. 69–124. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, K., & Lemoine, K. (2005). Definite null objects in (spoken) French: A construction-grammar account. In Fried, M. & Boas, H. C. (eds.), Grammatical constructions: Back to the roots, pp. 13–55. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Larjavaara, M. (2000). Présence ou absence de l'objet: limites du possible en français contemporain. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Müller, N., Crysmann, B., & Kaiser, G. (1996). Interactions between the acquisition of French object drop and the development of the C-system. Language Acquisition, 5, 35–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, N., & Hulk, A. (2001). Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noailly, M. (1997). Les mystères de la transitivité invisible. Langages, 127, 96–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orfitelli, R., & Hyams, N. (2008). An experimental study of children's comprehension of null subjects: Implications for grammatical/performance accounts. In Chan, H., Jacob, H. & Kapia, E. (eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual BUCLD, pp. 335–346. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Paradis, J. (2004). The relevance of specific language impairment in understanding the role of transfer in L2 acquisition. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 67–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Pirvulescu, M., & Roberge, Y. (2008). Null objects in child language: Syntax and the lexicon. Lingua, 118, 370–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., Pirvulescu, M., & Roberge, Y. (2009). Bilingualism as a window into the language faculty: The acquisition of objects in French-speaking children in bilingual and monolingual contexts. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12 (1), 97–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, S. J., & Gathercole, S. E. (2001). Working memory test battery for children (WMTB-C). London: Psychological Corporation Europe.Google Scholar
Poncelet, M., & Van der Linden, M. (2003). L'évaluation du stock phonologique de la mémoire du travail: élaboration d'une épreuve de répétition de non-mots pour population francophone. Revue de Neuropsychologie, 13, 377–407.Google Scholar
Prévost, P. (2006). The phenomenon of object omission in child L2 French. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9, 263–280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prévost, P., & Paradis, J. (eds.) (2004). The acquisition of French in different contexts: Focus on functional categories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raposo, E. (1986). On the null object in European Portuguese. In Jaeggli, O. & Silva-Corvalan, C. (eds.), Studies in Romance linguistics, pp. 373–390. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberge, Y. (1990). The syntactic recoverability of null arguments. Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, I. (1997). Restructuring, head movement and locality. Linguistic Inquiry, 28, 423–460.Google Scholar
Rogers, V. (2009). Syntactic development in the second language acquisition of French by instructed English learners. Ph.D. dissertation, Newcastle University, U.K.Google Scholar
Scherag, A., Demuth, L., Rösler, F., Neville, H., & Röder, B. (2004). The effects of late acquisition of L2 and the consequences of immigration on L1 for semantic and morpho-syntactic language aspects. Cognition, 93, B97–B108.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access model. Second Language Research, 12, 40–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Selinker, L., Swain, M., & Dumas, G. (1975). The interlanguage hypothesis extended to children. Language Learning, 25, 139–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sportiche, D. (1996). Clitic constructions. In Rooryck, J. & Zaring, L. A. (eds.), Phrase structure and the lexicon, pp. 213–276. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tedeschi, R. (2009). Acquisition at the interface: A case study on object clitics in early Italian. Utrecht: LOT Publications.Google Scholar
Thorn, A., & Gathercole, S. E. (1999). Language-specific knowledge and short-term memory in bilingual and non-bilingual children. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 52A (2), 303–324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Towell, R., & Hawkins, R. (1994). Approaches to second language acquisition. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Trahey, M., & White, L. (1993). Positive evidence and preemption in the second language classroom. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 15 (2), 181–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trueswell, J. C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N. M., & Logrip, M. L. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89–134.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wexler, K., & Manzini, R. (1987). Parameters, binding theory, and learnability. Linguistic Inquiry, 18, 413–44.Google Scholar
White, L. (1985). The pro-drop parameter in adult second language acquisition. Language Learning, 35, 47–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, L. (1996). Clitics in L2 French. In Clahsen (ed.), pp. 335–368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yuan, B. (1997). Asymmetry of null subjects and null objects in Chinese speakers’ L2 English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 467–497.CrossRefGoogle Scholar