Chapter published in:
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11: Selected papers from the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), London, Ontario
Edited by Silvia Perpiñán, David Heap, Itziri Moreno-Villamar and Adriana Soto-Corominas
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11] 2017
► pp. 209–227

Null subjects in the early acquisition of English by child heritage speakers of Spanish

| Rutgers University
| Rutgers University
| Rutgers University
This paper investigates the development of English and Spanish subject production in 8 heritage bilingual children (age range: 4;1–5;3; mean age: 4;7). Oral production of overt and null subjects was assessed using a picture-based story re-telling task and a description task. Subjects were coded according to type (overt or null), and pragmatic function (new information, topic continuation, recovery, contrast and change of topic). Results indicate a robust distribution of pragmatically appropriate subjects in Spanish; however, non adult-like null subjects were also found in a subset of the English utterances. We propose that cross-linguistic influence from Spanish encouraged children to have more than one grammar available (Amaral & Roeper 2014), with the option to treat English as a null-subject language.
Keywords: heritage bilinguals, child bilingualism, cross-linguistic influence, null subjects, acquisition of Spanish, acquisition of English
Published online: 19 October 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.11.10aus
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