Omission of clitics in Portuguese-Spanish bilingual acquisition

Abstract

This study examines clitic omission in Spanish-Portuguese bilingual acquisition. Using an elicited production task, we show that bilinguals omit clitics in both languages, but their rates of omission are higher in Portuguese. We show that, although bilinguals differ from monolinguals in their rates of omission in Spanish, they progressively become closer to monolinguals and like monolinguals they distinguish different syntactic contexts. This suggests that bilingual development is essentially similar to monolingual development but it is slower in what concerns syntactic properties for which the input may be ambiguous.