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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Bilingualism
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/flang.2025.1413119
This article is part of the Research Topic The Role of Literacy and Schooling in Heritage Language Maintenance and Growth View all 5 articles
The acquisition of object clitic pronouns in Heritage Romanian
Provisionally accepted
Mihaela Pirvulescu 1*
Virginia Hill 2- 1 University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada
- 2 University of New Brunswick Saint John, Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada
For full guidelines please refer to Author Guidelines This paper examines the acquisition of object clitic pronouns in Heritage Romanian (HR) by schoolage children in Toronto who are second-generation speakers of Romanian -i.e., children of firstgeneration immigrant parents. These children have been exposed to Romanian as their first language (L1) since birth within the home, while English has served as the societal language, primarily encountered outside the home. Additionally, they were enrolled in French immersion programs between the ages of 3 and 6. The findings demonstrate that HR exhibits similar patterns in the domain of object clitics as those observed in Romanian-dominant trilingual children, particularly regarding clitic omissions at specific developmental stages. Moreover, HR shares characteristics commonly identified in bilingual (heritage) language acquisition, such as gender errors. Overall, this study provides further evidence that both language use and literacy play a crucial role in shaping heritage language proficiency.
Keywords: keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4, keyword5. (Min.5-Max. 8
Received: 06 Apr 2024; Accepted: 20 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Pirvulescu and Hill. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Mihaela Pirvulescu, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada
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