This article assesses the impact of bilingualism on the acquisition of pronominal direct objects in French and English (clitics in French and strong pronouns in English). We show that, in comparison to monolingual children, bilingual children omit more pronominal objects for a longer period in both languages. At the same time, the development in each language spoken by the bilinguals follows the developmental asymmetry found in the language of their monolingual counterparts: there are more omissions in French than in English. It is also shown that language dominance affects the rate of omissions as there are fewer omissions in the language in which children receive more exposure, i.e. the dominant language. We analyze these results as reflecting a bilingual effect based on the retention of a default null object representation. This in turn is supported by reduced overall input for bilingual children and by language-internal input ambiguity.

The acquisition of Spanish null pronouns is an optimal domain for comparing the predictions of generativist vs. probabilistic approaches to language acquisition. This paper presents two studies on the acquisition of null subjects by English adult learners of Spanish as a second language. The first investigates a low frequency construction in which the antecedent of the pronoun is a quantifier, and the distribution is regulated by a principle of UG. The second looks at a high frequency context,where the distribution of the null pronoun depends on whether it is interpreted as focus or as discourse topic. The data indicate early mastery, and no development in the case of the low frequency quantifier construction, and gradual acquisition for the distribution of pronouns in discourse. These findings lend support to grammatical as opposed to probabilistic approaches to language learning.

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Where do the two languages of the bilingual child interact? The literature has debated whether bilingual children have delays in the acquisition of direct objects. The variety of methods and languages involved have prevented clear conclusions. In a transitivity-based approach, null objects are a default structural possibility, present in all languages. Since the computation of lexical and syntactic transitivity depends on lexical acquisition, we propose a default retention hypothesis, predicting that bilingual children retain default structures for aspects of syntactic development specifically linked to lexical development (such as objects). Children acquiring French (aged 3;0–4;2, N = 34) in a monolingual context and a French/English bilingual context participated in a study eliciting optional and obligatory direct objects. The results show significant differences between the rates of omissions in the two groups for both types of objects. We consider two models of how the bilingual lexicon may determine the timetable of development of transitivity.