Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating theories of the over-production of subject pronouns in bilinguals

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A fundamental skill that children must acquire is the ability to use language to refer to people and objects around them. Pronominal subjects like ‘he’ and ‘she’ are universal linguistic devices used to refer to a person mentioned or implied in previous discourse. Pronouns allow speakers to avoid redundancy or repetition, thus making languages more economical. At the same time, the ability to track referents in discourse develops over time. How children learn to interpret and appropriately use these referential devices is a central question in language acquisition research, particularly because mastering pronominal subjects takes up to adolescence. Studying this ability in the bilingual development of children who speak typologically different but syntactically similar languages in the way pronouns are expressed is critical to understand the complementing roles of linguistic and cognitive development in children and adolescents. This project investigates the acquisition and development of pronominal subject expression in school-age monolingual and bilingual children in order to assess potential developmental delays in bilingual populations and to examine how parents’ linguistic choices may influence children’s linguistic behavior. 200 children ages 6 to 13 will be compared to 90 adults (half monolinguals, half bilinguals who simultaneously acquired two languages). The bilingual population will be tested to evaluate the acquisitional differences of the socio-politically majority language and the minority language in a society with stable bilingualism and a strong education system in the minority language. Children’s comprehension and production will be measured through oral production and comprehension tasks. Because the pair of languages studied are null subject languages, the results will contribute to evaluate two competing accounts of subject over-production in the bilingual literature ––crosslinguistic influence versus cognitive load–– that are also central questions in the acquisition of syntax.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.