L’acquisition des pronoms clitiques français par un enfant bilingue français-néerlandais

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, the acquisition of French subject and object pronouns by Anouk, a French-Dutch bilingual girl is studied and compared with the acquisition by monolingual French children. At first sight there are no major differences between Anouk and the children discussed in the literature. There are however some indications that the status of the pronouns in Anouk’s data is not the same as that in the monolingual data. In Anouk’s data, there are no utterances where a quantified nominal subject is doubled by a subject clitic. Consequently, it is impossible to argue that her subject pronouns have the status of agreement markers which they are claimed to have in the case of monolingual children. Moreover, Anouk acquires both subject and object pronouns at roughly the same moment—to what is found for the monolinguals. Finally, Anouk makes position errors with object pronouns which are similar to those found in French L2 acquisition data. It is proposed that this may be due to the (indirect) influence of Dutch, her other language.