engleski

Subject pronoun interpretation in Croatian: Comparing monolinguals with simultaneous bilinguals

This paper reports the results of an experimental study into the interpretation of subject pronouns in ambiguous intra-sentential contexts in Croatian. Being a null-subject language (like Italian), Croatian allows subject pronouns to be either expressed (overt) or omitted (null). The use of these forms is regulated by discourse- pragmatic conditions. Two groups of 11-year-old children, Croatian-Italian simultaneous bilinguals and Croatian monolinguals, and a group of monolingual Croatian-speaking adults completed a picture selection task. Complex sentences contained an ambiguous null or overt subject pronoun in the subordinate clause, which followed the main clause. The participants were asked to choose between two pictures, thereby selecting the subject or the object of the main clause as the antecedent of the pronoun. The two groups of 11-year-olds did not differ in their antecedent selection for null and overt pronouns, but both differed from the adults in the overt pronoun condition, where they selected the subject antecedent more often than the adults. This suggests that Croatian-Italian simultaneous bilinguals do not lag behind Croatian monolinguals in the acquisition of the discourse- pragmatic constraints on the interpretation of Croatian subject pronouns in ambiguous intra- sentential contexts.

Interface Hypothesis ; syntax ; discourse-pragmatics ; null-subject languages ; null subject pronouns ; overt subject pronouns ; simultaneous bilinguals ; Croatian ; Italian

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