Dialogic and pragmatic aspects of early object realization: a crosslinguistic comparison of three Romance languages

This exploratory research aimed to assess the impact of pragmatic and dialogic factors on the choice of referring expressions at the onset of transitive constructions in three Romance languages. The study was conducted using a corpus of three adult-child dialogues with three 2;6-year-old children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese (BP), Spanish (Sp), and French (Fr). After analyzing the distribution of forms for accusative and dative objects, we assessed the impact of the input (through two levels of influence) and of the attentional and discursive status of the referents (through four degrees of accessibility). Overall, the results showed the children’s sensitivity to pragmatic factors, but we also found different uses for null objects in each language: the Brazilian child used more over-explicit forms when nulls would be accepted, while the French child used null objects when pronouns were expected. The Spanish-speaking child showed little disparity from the adults’ usage. The three children adopted linguistic forms from the adults' speech, and this strategy seems to contribute to the children's assessment of referent accessibility and the acquisition of challenging weak forms.