Younger monolingual and bilingual children chose significantly more pragmatically inappropriate overt subject pronouns than older children and adults. In Italian, by contrast, the patterns of results were much more varied. The results showed no statistically significant differences in English: regardless of age, language combination, and language of the community, participants overwhelmingly rejected ungrammatical sentences with a missing subject and chose sentences with an overt subject pronoun. A further aim of the study was to test the influence of input and exposure to Italian by comparing bilinguals living in Italy and bilinguals living in the UK.
The aim was to disentangle possible effects of cross-linguistic influence from the more general effects of bilingualism and the use of ‘default’ forms. This study investigates the acceptability of Italian and English pronominal subject forms in −topic shift and +topic shift contexts in English-Italian and Spanish-Italian bilingual children aged 6–7 and 8–10, age-matched monolingual children, and monolingual adults.
