Lara Culev, Pompeu Fabra University

Clitic pronouns are among the most studied linguistic elements in monolingual and multilingual language acquisition (Cardinaletti & Starke, 2000; Gavarró et al., 2011; Manetti & Belletti, 2021). Although direct and indirect clitic object pronouns have been widely studied in bilingual children (Bernardini & Timofte, 2017; Bernardini & van de Weijer, 2018; Kupisch & Muller, 2009; Varlokosta et al., 2016), the currently available literature provides limited results on other kinds of clitics, specifically partitive (Gavarró et al., 2011; Soto-Corominas, 2019) and clitic clusters composed of dative+accusative or dative+partitive clitics (Smith et al., 2023).

Recent global migrations have led to significant multicultural and multilingual conditions in many countries. In this talk, I will present an ongoing study in Catalonia, an autonomous community in which Spanish and Catalan are the main languages. In addition, there is a sizable Italian community residing in this area, in which children acquire Italian as a Heritage Language (HL) in addition to Catalan and Spanish, thus being trilingual. The present study focuses on the acquisition of Italian, including direct, indirect object clitics, the partitive/oblique ne, and clitic clusters in Italian heritage speakers in Barcelona (Spain). I will illustrate the methodology and materials of this ongoing study, with special emphasis on the test design, type of structures, and the main characteristics of the participants, discussing some challenges.