Early or Late CP Acquisition? Evidence from topics and other CP diagnostics in Germanic–Romance bilinguals
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Although extensively studied in monolinguals, research on the development of functional categories in bilingual children remains limited (for a discussion, see Meisel, 1990; Paradis & Genesee, 1997; Serratrice, 2000; Müller, 2022). This paper contributes novel data through two corpus studies on the development of the left periphery in Germanic–Romance bilinguals acquiring German-Italian, German-Spanish and Dutch-Italian. In the first study, I show that (some) CP structures are produced early across all languages and children, while the development of topicalization strategies (e.g., topicalization vs. Clitic Left Dislocation) shows strong language-specific effects. Topics are systematically early-acquired in their Germanic languages, whereas CLLD in Romance emerges significantly later – corroborating findings from monolingual studies (among many others, Boser et al., 1992; Santelmann, 1995; Westergaard, 2009; Grinstead, 2004; Tsimpli, 2005; Soares, 2006). A second, supplementary corpus study on the development of cliticization furthermore shows that the late development of CLLD is not attributable to (similarly) late development of clitics; it is specific to CLLD. I explore potential explanations for this language-driven asymmetry, particularly their relative parametric complexity. Overall, I propose these results are problematic for approaches assuming crosslinguistically fixed and late development of CP, such as mainstream maturational approaches (i.a., Radford, 1990; Friedmann et al., 2021), favoring instead early CP development.
Source: Apollo (University of Cambridge)
DOI: 10.17863/cam.128835
Author: Bosch Masip, Núria
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7147166759
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