The study offers novel evidence on the grammar and processing of clitic placement in heritage languages. Building on earlier findings of divergent clitic placement in heritage European Portuguese and Serbian, this study extends this line of inquiry to Bulgarian, a language where clitic placement is subject to strong prosodic constraints. We found that, in heritage Bulgarian, clitic placement is processed and rated differently than in the baseline, and we asked whether such clitic misplacement results from the transfer from the dominant language or follows from language-internal reanalysis. We used a self-paced listening task and an aural acceptability rating task with 13 English-dominant, highly proficient heritage speakers and 22 monolingual speakers of Bulgarian. Heritage speakers of Bulgarian process and rate the grammatical proclitic and ungrammatical enclitic clitic positions as equally acceptable, and we contend that this pattern is due to language-internal reanalysis. We suggest that the trigger for such reanalysis is the overgeneralization of the prosodic Strong Start Constraint from the left edge of the clause to any position in the sentence.

Previous research has shown that the computation of subject-verb number agreement can be derailed by the presence of syntactically illicit nouns, a phenomenon called agreement attraction. By contrast, the incidence of agreement attraction with anaphoric dependencies is less clear: previous work has mostly focused on reflexives and strong pronouns, which sometimes show attraction and other times do not. Meanwhile, research on clitics—a different class of pronominal anaphora—is scarcer. To expand the empirical record, we examined clitic pronouns in an under-researched language, Bulgarian. The results of a large sample eye-tracking study showed clear agreement attraction effects in fixation durations and regressive eye movements to the clitic pronoun and following words. These findings provide further evidence that the variable attraction profile of anaphoric dependencies might depend on the features of an anaphoric element, including its placement and the role of syntactic constraints in establishing the antecedent-pronoun dependency.

This article discusses the findings of studies on the acquisition and processing of pronominal clitic objects in Slavic languages. Through a systematic overview of these findings, it highlights the role of language-internal factors in shaping the acquisition challenges with clitics and the impact of individual language experience on direct object realization in heritage language grammars. The discussion integrates findings from both online methodologies (self-paced listening, eye-tracking and ERP) and offline tasks (acceptability judgment task), raising important questions about the ways psycholinguistic methods can contribute to our understanding of clitic representation and processing across different populations. The article concludes by emphasizing the need for more experimental studies on clitics in Slavic languages, particularly studies that address cross-linguistic variation in their behaviour and develop empirically testable predictions based on rigorous theoretical research.

This new Bulgarian grammar is a welcome addition to the field of Slavic linguistics. Its author, Ruselina Nicolova, is a distinguished scholar who has been at the forefront of Bulgarian linguistics for many years. The book, a result of her decades long pedagogical and scholarly work, presents a thorough account of Bulgarian morphology, offering an excellent summary of the existing literature in Bulgarian and advancing new analyses of debated issues, such as definiteness and evidentiality. Phonology and syntax are not represented in the book apart from a few short sections on sound changes and morphophonemic alternations and a brief description of the linear order of clitics. Rather, the author's goal is to offer a comprehensive examination of Bulgarian morphological categories. It is thus not surprising that the book is packed with data, which is both an advantage and a challenge to the reader. Making sense of the data could sometimes be problematic because the Bulgarian example and its English translation are not graphically separated from the rest of the text. Nevertheless, the author's choice to transliterate the examples using the Scientific Transliteration System of Cyrillic (with a couple of exceptions, such as ch instead of h for the Bulgarian х and â instead of ă for ъ) makes it more appealing to a wider linguistic community not necessarily familiar with the Cyrillic script.

Research on Russian as a heritage language has played a central role in the development of heritage language studies