Acquisition of null objects in Mandarin Chinese by heritage speakers: Syntax-pragmatics interface knowledge without inflectional morphology

In these previous work on heritage language acquisition, the acquisition of inflectional morphology (e.g. either agreement morphology or topic marking) is also a relevant acquisition task associated with the syntax-discourse phenomena under investigation.

In this paper we focus on the acquisition of discourse-conditioned structures by heritage speakers when inflectional morphology is not part of the learning task. Specifically, we report results of a picture-verification experiment focusing on English-dominant heritage Chinese speakers’ grammatical knowledge of null objects. As a topic-prominent language lacking verbal tense/agreement morphology, the licensing and identification of null arguments in Chinese has nothing to do with agreement morphology.