Early or Late CP Acquisition? Evidence from topics and other CP diagnostics in Germanic–Romance bilinguals

Although extensively studied in monolinguals, research on the development of functional categories in bilingual children remains limited (for a discussion, see Meisel, 1990; Paradis & Genesee, 1997; Serratrice, 2000; Müller, 2022). This paper contributes novel data through two corpus studies on the development of the left periphery in Germanic–Romance bilinguals acquiring German-Italian, German-Spanish and Dutch-Italian. In the first study, I show that (some) CP structures are produced early across all languages and children, while the development of topicalization strategies (e.g., topicalization vs. Clitic Left Dislocation) shows strong language-specific effects. Topics are systematically early-acquired in their Germanic languages, whereas CLLD in Romance emerges significantly later – corroborating findings from monolingual studies (among many others, Boser et al., 1992; Santelmann, 1995; Westergaard, 2009; Grinstead, 2004; Tsimpli, 2005; Soares, 2006). A second, supplementary corpus study on the development of cliticization furthermore shows that the late development of CLLD is not attributable to (similarly) late development of clitics; it is specific to CLLD. I explore potential explanations for this language-driven asymmetry, particularly their relative parametric complexity. Overall, I propose these results are problematic for approaches assuming crosslinguistically fixed and late development of CP, such as mainstream maturational approaches (i.a., Radford, 1990; Friedmann et al., 2021), favoring instead early CP development.