A cross-linguistic study of the acquisition of clitic and pronoun production

Abstract

This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of
\nthird-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology
\nallows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages
\nthat lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ
\nclitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”), thus establishing a robust
\ncross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for
\n5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results,
\nindicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to
\nselect a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as
\nwell as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production
\nof pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who
\nat age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for
\nlanguage impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a
\ndevelopmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain crosslinguistic
\ndifferences discussed in the article.