On That-omission and its absence in the written production of bilingual Spanish/Catalan L2-learners of english

Following recent minimalist accounts of the English so-called that-omission construction (as in I think this book is interesting), this article analyses the written production of bilingual Spanish/Catalan L2 learners of English and reveals L1 interference in the acquisition of this construction. Th e fi rst part of this article shows how the phenomenon of complementiser omission is diff erent in English with respect to Catalan and Spanish, and summarises a selection of recent proposals. Th e second part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the data of a group of L2-learners of English at diff erent levels of development. We conclude at the end of the article that the L2 production of these students suggests that the that-insertion rule responsible for the presence of that in specifi c syntactic environments in English has not been learned.