Participle agreement and clitic omission

Abstract

Object clitic omission has been considered to be a general feature of child grammar. In this paper we show that while omission is high in young Catalan speaking children, it is very low in Spanish-speaking children. This difference can be attributed to the availability of participle agreement when objects cliticise. I present a research where we test, through a grammaticality judgement task, the sensitivity of Catalan and Spanish children to participle agreement and find a statistically significant difference between the two languages.