A bidirectional study of object omissions in French-English bilinguals

A common assumption in the field of bilingual acquisition is that while bilinguals might have separate language representations, the languages can also influence one another. Previous studies on object (clitic) omission consider a combination of null argument and non-null argument languages, and results vary. The debate concerns whether or not cross-linguistic effects exist in this domain. This paper reports data from bilingual French-English children on an elicited production task. The goal of the paper is to determine if we can observe a bilingual effect in the domain of object clitic omission which cannot be attributed to cross-linguistic influence. We conclude that such effects exist and we propose to attribute them to the retention of a default null object representation.