To Drop or Not to Drop? Third-Person Overt Versus Null Referential Choice in Monolingual and Bilingual Russian–Hebrew-Speaking Children

The current study investigated null and overt pronominal choice in bilingual Russian–Hebrew-speaking children, for whom Russian is their heritage language (HL) and Hebrew is their societal language (SL). While both Russian and Hebrew permit null subject and object pronouns, the mechanisms for licensing null elements differ between the two languages. The investigation of pronominal elements within this language dyad aims to deepen our understanding of pronominal choices in bilinguals. Participants included 97 children (ages 4–8) and 40 adults: bilingual Russian–Hebrew children (n = 57), monolingual Russian children (n = 20) and adults (n = 22), and monolingual Hebrew children (n = 20) and adults (n = 18). Bilinguals were tested in both languages. Children’s morpho-syntactic abilities were evaluated using LITMUS Sentence Repetition Tasks. Results indicated that bilinguals exhibited lower morpho-syntactic abilities compared to both monolingual control groups. However, no significant differences were found between their HL and SL at the group level. To assess pronoun choice, we used a pictorial elicitation task targeting third-person subject and object pronouns. Results revealed clear cross-linguistic differences: Russian adults predominantly used null subjects, while Hebrew adults preferred overt pronouns. Turning to bilingual children, in Hebrew, they showed more adult-like patterns than monolingual peers, suggesting accelerated development in the SL. In Russian, both monolingual and bilingual children overused overt pronouns, indicating a shared developmental delay rather than transfer effects. Age, but not morpho-syntactic skills or age of onset of bilingualism, predicted pronoun use, pointing to a general maturational trajectory. Findings partially support the Interface Hypothesis and highlight the role of developmental constraints and discourse-level processing challenges, consistent with the Silent Problem framework.