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It has been noted by many researchers that young bilingual children pass through a stage of early mixing which extends approximately until the age of 2;6 and ends abruptly. Research on bilingual first language acquisition has clearly excluded the possibility to explain mixed utterances as the result of a fused lexical or grammatical system. However, the actual debate on the reasons for early mixing still continues. Two main approaches have dominated the field of language mixing in adults: One assumes that adult's codeswitching is constrained by grammatical principles, suggesting that a third grammar is responsible for the grammaticality of mixed utterances (e.g., the Equivalence Constraint formulated by Poplack (1980), or the Functional Head Constraint formulated by Belazi, Rubin & Toribio (1994) among others). Since child grammar is supposed to be organized differently from adult grammar, the grammatical “ingredients” of the principles which constrain codeswitching are absent in early child language (Köppe & Meisel, 1995). It therefore follows that early mixing in young bilingual children is not to be considered as constrained by any grammatical principles. The other approach argues that codeswitching in adults is not regulated by external grammatical principles, but that the only constraints which govern codeswitching are those required by the two languages involved (MacSwan, 2000). We will show that this assumption holds for child language as well. Our analysis of mixing opens the perspective that child grammar can be considered to be organized in the same way as adult grammar. Furthermore, we will argue that early mixing is related to developing performance abilities, in the present paper to the readiness on the bilingual child's part to speak the language(s).

Research on the development of pronouns in French and Italian has shown that object clitics are acquired with more effort than other syntactic categories: they are realized later in development than subject clitics and strong subject and object pronouns. Both the delay of object clitics and the subject-object asymmetry are robust. Unlike earlier studies, the present one compares the development in monolingual acquisition of French and Italian with regard to language-specific differences in the development of object clitics:We show that very young French children tend to repeat the object DP in obligatory contexts for clitics, while Italian children omit the object altogether. The difference between the groups becomes smaller in the course of the acquisition process.We explain this difference by proposing different licensing strategies for null objects: While French children use a pragmatic strategy like in adult Japanese, Italian children use a syntactic structure which is representative of Brazilian Portuguese, i.e. they license objects via AGR. In the vein of Zushi (2003), we investigate the role of agreement morphemes in the licensing of pro. With regard to the identification of null objects, we follow Shlonsky (1997) by associating different pro-types to these strategies: Italian children use FP-pro, French children NP-pro.

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