Object Clitic Omission in Child Spanish: Evaluating Representational and Processing Accounts

Abstract

This study explores the widely documented difficulty children have with object clitics in the acquisition of Romance languages. It reports on two experiments: a production task and a comprehension task. Results from the elicitation task confirm that object omission occurs at nonnegligible rates in 2- and 3-year-olds. Findings from the sentence-picture matching task show that children do not sanction a grammar with referential null objects, as suggested by previous research, and that children do not always assign a transitive interpretation to clitic constructions. Further analysis reveals that both the frequency of object omissions in production as well as the results in the clitic conditions of the receptive task are strongly negatively correlated with an independent measure of verbal working memory (nonword repetition task), consistent with the hypothesis that object clitic omission is affected by linguistic processing and short-term memory limitations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research would not have been possible without the help of numerous people. In particular, I am grateful for the instrumental guidance and support provided by Nina Hyams throughout this project. I am also greatly indebted to Stephen Crain, Robert Daland, John Grinstead, Theres Grüter, Jeffrey Lidz, Robyn Orfitelli, Jeannette Schaeffer, Carson Schütze, Megha Sundara, María Luisa Zubizarreta, Kie Zuraw, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their valuable help and comments at various stages of this research. Finally, I thank the day care center directors, parents, and children who participated in this study. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 38th Boston University Conference on Language Development in November 2013.

Notes

¹ Differential object marking with personal a is required for animate direct objects.

² We will not address how the accusative case is checked in Spanish. For different analyses, see Kayne (1993), Wexler (2002), Tsakali & Wexler (2004).

³ Omission rate was calculated by dividing the number of object omissions in obligatory contexts by the total number of clitics, full DPs, and object omissions.

⁴ In a corpus study of French, Pérez-Leroux et al. (2006) found that children tend to approximate the transitivity patterns of their parents. Nevertheless, their conclusions were based on very few tokens: Five out of the six verbs they analyzed occurred less than 10 times in the child data.

⁵ For criticisms of this account see Hyams & Schaeffer (2008) and Grüter (2006).

⁶ Note that our study was not designed to test this particular pragmatic account. We will, however, discuss it in more detail in section 4.

⁷ This is allowed under an extension of TAG, tree-local multicomponent TAG (TL-TAG), see Kulick, Frank & Shanker (2000).

⁸ It is important to notice that the authors must be assuming that the subject is retrieved before the object, and that movement to Spec-CP occurs before the ClP is substituted. This may not come as a surprise: Both theoretical and experimental linguists have long noted that the subject of a sentence is privileged, and in accordance with the principle of incrementality, the external argument position must be processed before the internal argument (Bianchi & Chesi 2006; Bock 1986; Ferreira 2000; Keenan & Comrie 1977; Levelt 1989; Phillips 1996).

⁹ The predictions of Wexler, Gavarró & Torrens’s (2004) UCC account are not clear in this regard.

¹⁰ Other performance-based accounts (Jakubowicz & Nash 2001; Prévost 2006) do not make explicit predictions with regard to the comprehension of null object structures.

¹¹ Notice this is a rather old group. Most studies investigating object clitic omission in Romance languages report illicit omission to be consistently below 10% by approximately age 4;00 (see Grüter 2006 for a complete overview).

¹² The potential object was mentioned in a pretrial in order to make the use of the clitic felicitous.

¹³ However, in the elicitation contexts they all required an overt object clitic.

¹⁴ Only the adults from the CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000) corpora were directing their speech to children. The other two corpora (Lope Blanch 1971) were included not only to increase the volume of data but also due to the reported significant effect of overheard speech in language acquisition (see Akhtar, Jipson & Callanan 2001; Au et al. 2002; Knightly et al. 2003, inter alia).

¹⁵ Conditions were dummy coded. Baseline condition was the preverbal simple present condition.

¹⁶ For criticisms against this hypothesis see Berger-Morales, Salustri & Gilkerson (2005), Meisel (1989), Paradis & Genesee (1997).

¹⁷ We observed two types of infelicity: repeating the DP mentioned in the question (36/53), and using a different DP, such as a demonstrative, a numeral, or a different noun (17/53).

¹⁸ This was done by playing the game Walrus and Alligator. Walrus would say a sentence in English, and Alligator would repeat a “special part of that sentence.” After several trials, the child would take the place of Alligator.