Peripheral cross-linguistic interference in the acquisition of accusative clitics by Romanian–Hungarian simultaneous bilinguals

Abstract

This paper presents the results of the first study of the acquisition of Accusative clitics in Romanian by Romanian-Hungarian bilingual children. Our data show that the acquisition route is similar to the one in a monolingual setting. An interesting observation which arises from this study is that two structures which are superficially similar in the two languages favour the occurrence of non-target constructions, unavailable in either of the two languages. They occur under bilingual conditions via non-language-specific mechanisms, such as comparison and analogy. This is why their use, age of onset, and end of influence are subject to individual variation. Their analysis reveals that even structures which are the result of nonlanguage-specific mechanisms, when drawing on morpho-syntactic knowledge, can fall within the range of constructions made available by Universal Grammar. The same superficial similarity seems to boost the acquisition of clitics by RomanianHungarian bilinguals.1 There are, of course, certain well-defined contexts in which object drop is possible: prototypical and indefinite objects, the "deixis object drop" context, the recipe context (Massam and Roberge 1989), other instructions in the imperative and, marginally, with the infinitive. 2 The following abbreviations are used in the glosses: