The CYCL1A project investigated the first language acquisition of Cypriot Greek object clitics on the basis of spontaneous speech and elicited production data, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Our database consists of spontaneous data from Greek Cypriot children aged 2 to 4 years. The experimental investigation involved the implementation of an elicited-production task for 3rd person singular object clitics in children from three age groups (AG A: 2;6–3;0, AG B: 3;0–3;6, and AG C: 3;6–4;0). Based on the results of our study, we aimed to provide a description of the L1 acquisition of clitics in Cypriot Greek and offer an account for children's developmental data.
The project focused on the phenomenon of clitic misplacement, observed in early Cypriot Greek (as well as European Portuguese), but not in Standard Modern Greek (or other Romance languages such as Italian, French, or Spanish). One major goal of the CYCL1A project was to study this non-adult-like pattern of clitic placement and explore its implications for the L1 acquisition of pronominal clitics cross-linguistically.
Related activities concerning the acquisition and development of Cypriot Greek object clitics were also concurrently carried out by members of the Cyprus Acquisition Team in two funded research projects, the Gen-CHILD Project and the CySLI Project, whose principal investigator was Dr Kleanthes K. Grohmann.