The emergence of the pronouns Dutch er and French en in child L1 and the role of complexity

•Spontaneous speech of Dutch and French children reveal emergence order of ER and EN pronouns.•Language-internal and cross-linguistic differences are found in the order of emergence.•The emergence patterns can (partly) be explained by the Derivational Complexity Metric.

The purpose of this research is to explore the emergence of several types of ER pronouns (Dutch) and EN pronouns (French) in L1 acquisition from both a language-internal and cross-linguistic perspective, and to identify the role of syntactic complexity (based on Jakubowicz' Derivational Complexity Metric) in this acquisition process. The analysis of spontaneous speech data reveals substantial temporal differences in the emergences of pronominal constructions, both language-internally and cross-linguistically. This study shows that the emergence patterns can be properly accounted for by applying the Derivational Complexity Metric to the spontaneous child data we collected.