Null objects in child language: Syntax and the lexicon

Object realization or omission has both a syntactic component (what kinds of mechanisms govern the licensing and recoverability of null objects) and a lexical component (what types of verbs allow optional realization of their direct object argument). In this paper, we consider early object omissions in two experimental studies with French and English speaking children. Our goal is to evaluate the extent to which early object omission is the result of deficits in the syntactic or lexical representation of objects. Our approach relates developmental rates to the complexity of the input: differences in the rate of object omissions depend directly on the extent and variety of null object constructions available in the target grammar. All children go through a stage of object pronoun optionality. This stage does not reflect difficulty in computation, but rather the free availability of referential null cognate objects. Children exposed to a language like French retain the referential reading of the null cognate object longer because they are exposed to a wider variety of null object contexts. The results of our experimental work support the conclusion that lexical learning in the verbal domain is driven by syntax.