Fillers in multilingual children acquiring the non-null-subject property of French

The aim of the present study is to analyze both the form and function of fillers across phonological and syntactic dimensions in first language acquisition, establishing a link between the two domains. The focus of the present investigation lies on preverbal fillers, i.e., target-deviant syllabic or consonantal units filling the subject position, in longitudinal as well as cross-sectional data of multilingual children acquiring French simultaneously to German, Italian or Russian. The data suggest that fillers serve different functions for multilingual and monolingual children, especially if subject realization is considered. Specifically, fillers appear to constitute a strategy employed by monolingual children to express linguistic features whose specific values have not yet been acquired in the target language. Moreover, the analysis of grammatical aspects coded into fillers such as gender, number and person features as well as the consideration of target-deviant subjects reveal substantial differences between the two groups. The findings support the claim that multilingual children display an accelerated acquisition of the non-null-subject property in French compared to their monolingual peers. This leads us to assume that acceleration is a phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by an analysis of fillers or of target-deviant subjects, suggesting that multilinguals are able to benefit from their other language, even if this language is parametrically different.