This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics ("pronoun languages") with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context ("clitic languages"), thus establishing a robust cross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for 5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results, indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to select a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as well as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production of pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who at age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for language impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a developmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain crosslinguistic differences discussed in the article. ARTICLE HISTORY

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The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 different languages, and 7 language (sub-)families. The study investigated the effects of two factors on question formation: (a) whether the question contains a simple interrogative word like 'who' or a complex one like 'which princess', and (b) whether the question word was related to the sentential subject or object position of the verb. The findings show that there is considerable variation among languages, but the two factors mentioned consistently affect children's performance. The cross-linguistic variation shows that three linguistic factors facilitate children's understanding of questions: having overt case morphology, having a single lexical item for both 'who' and 'which', and the use of synthetic verbal forms.

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anonymous reviewer points out that experimental data were related, in most cases, to binding theory, which might explain the focus on 3 rd person accusative clitics and refl exive clitics. This is indeed the case for several studies (Jakubowicz 1989; Baauw 2000; Hamann 2002, a.m.o.). It is equally true that in some previous studies relying on longitudinal data one can reconstruct from the tables the difference between the acquisition of 1 st , 2 nd and 3 rd person accusative clitics. What we noticed, though, in previous studies is a lack of focus on the relevance for the acquisition process of the distinction between 1 st /2 nd person accusative clitics, on the one hand, and 3 rd person accusative clitics, on the other.