Acknowledgments
In the course of the last ten years or so, we have conducted, with our team at the University of Toronto, a series of experiments with monolingual and bilingual children ranging in age from three to six, acquiring French, English and Spanish. Each experiment dealt with a specific variable or set of variables involved in object omission constructions. The results of these experiments allowed us to refine our hypotheses and predictions and to see a clear picture emerge as to how to best describe and analyze the developmental sequence involved in this particular domain of language development. The impetus for this book arose from our desire to gather all of our hypotheses, experimental results and analyses and to present them as part of a unified narrative. We would like to thank Cambridge University Press for the support and editorial expertise they have provided since the submission of our initial book proposal, in particular Helen Barton, Sarah Green, Neil Smith and three anonymous readers.
One of the great rewards of academic research can be found in the opportunity to work with undergraduate and graduate assistants. We have benefited greatly from the assistance of our graduate research assistants, Maria Alkurdi-Alzirkly, Tanya Battersby, Sophia Bello, Isabelle Belzil, Ailis Cournane, Mélanie Elliott, Anna Frolova, David Fournier, Caitlin Gaffney, Monica Irimia, Meï-Lan Mamode, Joanne Markle-LaMontagne, Milica Radisic, Lynn Tieu, Danielle Thomas and our undergraduate research assistants: Samantha Andrade, Diana Dascalu, Robyn Kadoguchi, Catherine Lam, Salwa Mohi-Uddin, Kate Orgill, Aliona Rudchenko, Eric Scott, Evelina Szaczewska, Gilliam Tom and Iga Wyroba. We can only hope that they see their involvement in our project as mutually beneficial.
As will become abundantly clear throughout the following chapters, it would not have been possible to articulate the narrative developed in this book without the previous research that was available early in our project, and that has been produced since, on the topic of object omissions in L1 acquisition. Similarly, several colleagues have kindly provided tremendous comments and suggestions over the years and we would like to thank them: Larisa Avram, Pat Balcom, Susanne Carroll, Anny Castilla-Earls, Maria Cristina Cuervo, Sarah Cummins, Anna-Maria Di Sciullo, Anna Gavarró, Brendon Gillan, John Grinstead, Maria Teresa Guasti, Theres Grüter, Aafke Hulk, Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, Tanya Kupisch, Marie Labelle, Diane Massam, Jürgen Meisel, Natascha Müller, Alan Munn, Letitia Naigles, Philippe Prévost, Liliana Sanchez, Jeanette Schaeffer, Christina Schmitt, Einat Shetreet, William Snyder, Jeffrey Steele, Nelleke Strik, Viçens Torrens, Michelle Troberg, Kamil Ud Deen and Jill de Villiers. Special thanks to Tom Roeper for having graciously accepted to contribute a preface; given the fundamental influence of his work on our own over so many years, we could not have hoped for a more appropriate preface writer!
A special thank you to all the children who contributed to this book (some of whom are now teenagers); during our many experiments, we managed to see the world and words through their eyes! We also thank the numerous day cares in the Montréal and Toronto areas; they generously made time and space available for us for testing. For the parents of all the children who participated in this study, a warm thank you for allowing your child to enchant us!
As stated previously, the nature of this book is such that some of its contents have been presented elsewhere, including the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD), Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA), the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA), the Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), the Romance Turn, Canadian Linguistic Association (CLA), and appeared in several journals and volumes, including Language Acquisition, Lingua, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, First Language, Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Romance Linguistics (Benjamins), Language Acquisition and Development (Cambridge Scholars Press), New Perspectives on Romance Linguistics (Benjamins), Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies (Benjamins). We would like to acknowledge the many anonymous reviewers who have helped us improve our contributions.
Finally, this book would not have been possible without the generous funding provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (410–2005–239 and 410–09–2026), and, at the University of Toronto, the office of the Provost, New College, Victoria College and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
