ABSTRACT
Null subject acquisition is vulnerable to cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children. In this study, two groups of English dominant bilingual children aged four to seven (heritage and second language learners of Spanish) completed an acceptability judgment task in both English and Spanish. English monolingual children of the same ages completed only the English task. The findings revealed differences in acceptability of null subjects in English between both groups of bilingual children and the English monolinguals. Additionally, a correlation was found between acquisition of verbal morphology and null subject acceptability in English. These results provide evidence for an extended null subject stage in bilingual children which may be due to competing input and cross-linguistic influence.
