1 The acquisition of Catalan clitics and its implications for complex verb structure Linda Escobar & Anna Gavarró (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) 0. Introduction There is a growing body of research on the acquisition of the pronominal system of natural languages. The goal of this paper 1 _is to examine the contrast between strong pronouns and clitics in the light of their acquisition; the data considered will be from Catalan, and further data from other languages will also be brought in. Our binding and coreference findings will be shown to have implications for the postulation of complex verb structure. The first finding in relation to the acquisition of strong pronouns, taken as our point of departure, is the contrast between pronouns and anaphors in English. Chien and Wexler (1990) observed that while (1a), with an anaphor, was an early acquisition, (1b), with a pronoun, was a late one. (1) a. John washes himself. b. John washes him. On the other hand, McKee (1992) found that this result was not replicated in the acquisition of Italian; children displayed adult-like behaviour for both (2a) and (2b) from early on. (2) a. Gianni si lava. b. Gianni lo lava. Italian pronouns and anaphors, unlike their English counterparts, are clitics, not strong pronouns. 1 _This work was carried out with the financial support of the Ministerio de Educación y Cultura through contracts to the authors under the Programa de Incorporación de Doctores at the UAB. We are grateful to the direction, teachers and children of the Escola Decroly de Barcelona for allowing us to carry out the experiments reported here in May 1998 and June 1999. We also thank Carlota Faixa for acting as experimenter, and Sergio Baauw, Glyn Morrill and Jaume Solà for discussion. Any remaining errors are our own.