La Quiero Ver~Quiero Verla: Monolingual and bilingual children's variable clitic placement

This study addresses whether/how monolingual and bilingual Spanish-speaking children differ in their acquisition of grammar by examining direct object clitics in contexts where either proclisis or enclisis is possible (Lo voy a ver vs. Voy a verlo). The current study examines variable clitic placement in sociolinguistic interviews conducted with 21 Spanish-English bilingual children of Mexican descent, ages 5-11, and 71 monolingual children in Mexico, ages 6-11. All direct object clitics in variable contexts were extracted (N =140 tokens, .2% of total word count). Both the monolingual and bilingual children produced high rates of proclisis (76%, 75%, respectively). It is concluded that naturalistic production data do not support the view that English impacts bilingual children’s patterns of variable clitic placement in Spanish. Instead, their patterns of use are the same as those found among monolingual children.