Chapter 7. On the production of subject and object relative clauses by child speakers of heritage Romanian in France

Abstract

This study investigates the production of subject and object restrictive relatives in child heritage Romanian in contact with French. The main goal is to evaluate the effect of schooling in the societal language, over a longer period of time, on the acquisition of these complex syntactic structures. Thirty-two child Romanian heritage speakers (ages 5–15), divided into two groups who – at testing time – had been in a French school for 1 to 3 years and for 5 to 8 years, respectively, completed an elicited production task. Their responses were compared to those of 32 age-matched monolingual Romanian children and 20 Romanian adults living in the homeland. The results indicated overall progress after onset of schooling. Child heritage speakers who had been in a French school for a longer period of time produced more relative clauses than the younger ones and the number of errors decreased with age. They went through the same qualitative stages as age-matched monolinguals but at a slower pace, with object relatives being more problematic than subject relatives. This vulnerability was reflected in a preference for less computationally costly but target-like structures and in the relatively prolonged use of non-target-like structures whose elimination from the grammar requires inspection of a higher amount of input.