De Lisser and Durrleman’s second chapter explores the syntax of missing subjects in the acquisition of creole languages by children. They focus on two Creoles – Jamaican, a non-null subject language, and Morisyen, a language which allows null subjects in certain contexts. The results of both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses reveal striking similarities in the L1 acquisition of subjects in both Jamaican and Morisyen. Both languages start out with a grammar displaying predominantly target-inconsistent missing subjects, which later shifts to a grammar involving an overwhelming number of overt subjects. This development of subjects in the grammar of Creole-speaking children can be accounted for by the modified version of the Truncation approach in terms of the Spell-out mechanism (De Lisser et al., 2016). The initial structure reflects Universal Grammar, a system providing the option of truncation, and which gives rise to subject drop.

De Lisser and Durleman’s first chapter focuses on Bickerton’s hypotheses about language acquisition. Whether articulated in terms of the Language Bioprogram or in terms of default parameter settings of Universal Grammar (1981, 1984, 1999, 2014, 2016), the hypotheses predict that prototypical Creole features will emerge in early stages of child productions. This view thus leads them to expect target-inconsistent utterances during the acquisition of non-Creole languages where such features are not present, and target-consistent utterances in the acquisition of Creole languages. The investigation tests the second of these predictions for negation via an eighteen-month longitudinal study of the spontaneous production of six Jamaican-speaking children between the ages of 18 and 23 months at the start of the research. The findings reveal an absence of target-inconsistent options for the expression of negation, suggesting that children acquiring Jamaican are knowledgeable of the rules governing negation from their earliest negative utterances, be they sentential, constituent or anaphoric. Taken together, these findings suggest that the acquisition of negation in Jamaican follows Bickerton’s predictions, which are also in line with the more general claim that Negative Concord (NC) is a default choice explored in early stages of child grammar regardless of the target (Moscatti 2020; Thornton 2020).