The acquisition of object clitic features in French: A comprehension study

• 3- to 5-year-old children have difficulties with object clitics in comprehension.
• There is an asymmetry between object clitics and strong pronouns, however children have difficulties with both in comprehension.
• There is a recency effect only for the younger group and only for the clitic condition.

The goal of this paper is to study gender and number agreement features in French object clitics and strong pronouns. We adopt an analysis of clitic pronouns as defective categories, namely as simply spell-outs of phi-features and of strong pronouns as having an additional NP-layer; we predict that children will treat the two types of pronouns differently, showing more difficulty with the comprehension of clitics than with that of strong pronouns. Results of a picture choice task with 3- to 5-year-old French-speaking children partially confirm this prediction. Furthermore, 3-year-old children are not sensitive to features on clitics, showing recency effects. Our discussion shows that current proposals have difficulties in accommodating these results. Object clitics seem to be treated, in comprehension, similarly to agreement phi-features. However, while object clitics clearly present more of a challenge than other types of pronominals, we propose that the problem, especially with younger children, lay with the working memory such that the children attempt to keep anaphoric dependencies as short as possible.