Bilingual and Monolingual Children’s Patterns of Syntactic Variation: Variable Clitic Placement in Spanish

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. Perez-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. Gutierrez 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.