Referring expressions in the narratives of Italian-English bilingual children

In this paper, I present the results of a study investigating the referring expressions and the selection of word order in the narrative productions of Italian-English bilingual children and of a control group of Italian monolingual children. The aim of the study is to establish whether bilingual children overproduce overt subjects in Italian in contexts of [topic-shift], where a null pronoun is the most appropriate option. In addition, the potential difference between the two groups is analysed in terms of the selection of the word order in contexts of presentational focus, where VS is the favoured option for Italian monolinguals. The results show that bilingual children do not overproduce overt pronouns in their narratives, instead they show a weaker preference for the VS word order.