The emergence of the pronouns Dutch er and French en in child L1 and the role of complexity Sanne Berends * , Aafke Hulk, Petra Sleeman Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands article info Article history: Available online xxx Keywords: L1 acquisition Syntax Complexity Pronouns abstract The purpose of this research is to explore the emergence of several types of ER pronouns (Dutch) and EN pronouns (French) in L1 acquisition from both a language-internal and cross-linguistic perspective, and to identify the role of syntactic complexity (based on Jakubowicz’ Derivational Complexity Metric) in this acquisition process. The analysis of spontaneous speech data reveals substantial temporal differences in the emergences of pronominal constructions, both language-internally and cross-linguistically. This study shows that the emergence patterns can be properly accounted for by applying the Derivational Complexity Metric to the spontaneous child data we collected. Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Creating sentences while applying the correct morpho-syntactic rules is intrinsically an intuitive process in adult language use. Speakers generally do not think about sentence structure while conversing, but do subconsciously possess the linguistic competence required to adequately map thoughts onto the appropriate structures and lexical items. However, this linguistic competence might be different in child language. Our study exposes a segment of this yet unknown territory by taking a closer look at the emergence of pronouns in early monolingual language acquisition and the role complexity plays in this. We focus specifically on two pronouns with comparable functions in the two languages: the Dutch pronoun er and the French pronoun en, henceforth referred to as such. Though production of these pronouns in early child language is mentioned in some previous work (van Hout et al., 2011; Gavarró et al., 2010; Sleeman and Hulk, 2013; van Dijk and Coopmans, 2013), to our knowledge, no language-internal or cross-linguistic study exists that investigates er and en in multiple usages. Investigation of these usages is nonetheless critical in this discussion as they suggest that these forms embed different types of pronouns that although homophonous, involve different derivations. These homophonous types of pronouns appear to carry different syntactic complexity loads, which we believe influence their order of emergence. In this contribution, we first give a synopsis of the different syntactic properties that the Dutch pronoun er and the French pronoun en can have (Section 2). We subsequently review the most relevant literature with respect to the acquisition process of these specific pronouns (Section 3), and explore what a syntactic approach, namely syntactic complexity, would predict for the order of emergence of these pronouns (Section 4). After describing the methodology (Section 5) we build upon the findings of previously conducted studies and fill a gap in the literature by reporting the data of our innovative and exploratory corpus-based study (Section 6). The discussion is a broader exploration of the role of syntactic complexity on pronoun use (Section 7). We end this article with some concluding remarks (Section 8). * Corresponding author. Department of Dutch Linguistics, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 134,1012 VB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail address: S.Berends2@uva.nl (S. Berends). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2016.10.001 0388-0001/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Language Sciences xxx (2016) 1–16 Please cite this article in press as: Berends, S., et al., The emergence of the pronouns Dutch er and French en in child L1 and the role of complexity, Language Sciences (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2016.10.001