Abstract
This study addresses whether monolingual and bilingual Spanish-speaking children differ in their acquisition of grammar by examining direct object clitic placement in children’s narratives. Specifically, we analyze contexts where either proclisis or enclisis is possible (Lo voy a ver ~ Voy a verlo). Corpus studies of adult monolingual Spanish show that proclisis is more frequent than enclisis. Furthermore, variation between proclisis and enclisis is constrained by linguistic factors, such as verb lexeme. We hypothesize that if bilingual children’s Spanish syntax is influenced by English, they will (i) produce higher rates of enclisis, and (ii) display decreased sensitivity to factors that constrain variation. One previous study of bilingual children suggests that English influences Spanish clitic placement. Pérez-Leroux, Cuza, and Thomas (Biling Lang Cogn 14(02):221–232, 2011) asked children to repeat sentences with proclisis and enclisis, and found that bilingual children reordered sentences with proclisis, and produced enclisis instead. In contrast, research on adult bilinguals’ production of proclisis/enclisis suggests no impact of English on Spanish. In fact, bilingual adults’ proclisis rates are similar to those of monolingual adults, and the same linguistic factors constrain variation between proclisis and enclisis among monolinguals and bilinguals alike (e.g. Gutiérrez M, Hisp Res J 9(4):299–313, 2008; Peace M, Southwest J Linguist 31(1):131–160, 2013). Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no previous research has examined variable clitic placement in bilingual children’s naturalistic production data.
Our study aims to address this gap in the literature, and asks whether bilingual children produce higher rates of enclisis than monolingual children do, which is predicted if indeed bilinguals transfer English word order into Spanish. Furthermore, we ask whether monolingual and bilingual children are similar to each other and to adults with respect to the tendency to pair proclisis with certain verb lexemes and enclisis with others. To address these questions, third person direct object clitics were extracted from narratives/sociolinguistic interviews with (i) 17 Spanish-English bilingual children of Mexican descent in the U.S. and (ii) 43 monolingual children in Mexico. All child participants were between 6 and 11 years old. Our results show no differences between monolingual and bilingual children, neither in overall rates of enclisis, nor in rates with particular verb lexemes. Furthermore, data from 21 adults from the same community as the bilingual children suggest that children match patterns of use found in their community. We interpret this as evidence that children learn probabilistic patterns of variation by attending to distributional tendencies in the input. We also discuss how our findings contribute to the current and pressing need to find ways to differentiate between typical and atypical bilingual language development in contexts of language dominance shift.
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Shin, N.L., Requena, P.E., Kemp, A. (2017). Bilingual and Monolingual Children’s Patterns of Syntactic Variation: Variable Clitic Placement in Spanish. In: Auza Benavides, A., Schwartz, R. (eds) Language Development and Disorders in Spanish-speaking Children. Literacy Studies, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53646-0_3
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