The use of subject pronouns by bilingual speakers using both a pro-drop and a non-pro-drop language (e.g. Spanish heritage speakers in the USA) is a well-studied topic in research on cross-linguistic influence in language contact situations. Previous studies looking at bilinguals with different proficiency levels have yielded conflicting results on whether there is transfer from the non-pro-drop patterns to the pro-drop language. Additionally, previous research has focused on speech patterns only. In this paper, we study the two modalities of language, speech and gesture, and ask whether and how they reveal cross-linguistic influence on the use of subject pronouns in discourse. We focus on elicited narratives from heritage speakers of Turkish in the Netherlands, in both Turkish (pro- drop) and Dutch (non-pro-drop), as well as from monolingual control groups. The use of pronouns was not very common in monolingual Turkish narratives and was constrained by the pragmatic contexts, unlike in Dutch. Furthermore, Turkish pronouns were more likely to be accompanied by localized gestures than Dutch pronouns, presumably because pronouns in Turkish are pragmatically marked forms. We did not find any cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speech or gesture patterns, in line with studies (speech only) of highly proficient bilinguals. We therefore suggest that speech and gesture parallel each other not only in monolingual but also in bilingual production. Highly proficient heritage speakers who have been exposed to diverse linguistic and gestural patterns of each language from early on maintain monolingual patterns of pragmatic constraints on the use of pronouns multimodally.

Speakers need to use a variety of referring expressions (REs) (e.g. full noun phrases, pronouns or null forms) in pragmatically appropriate ways to produce coherent narratives. Languages, however, differ from each other in terms of a) whether REs as arguments can be dropped or not and b) whether personal pronouns encode gender or not. Here we examine two languages that differ from each other in these two aspects and ask whether the co-reference context (i.e., referents are maintained or re-introduced) and the gender encoding options affect the use of REs differentially. We elicited narratives from Dutch and Turkish speakers about two types of three-person events, one including people of the same and the other of mixed-gender. Speakers of both languages followed a general principle of using full forms such as noun phrases (NPs) while re-introducing a previously mentioned referent into the discourse and reduced forms (overt or null pronoun) while maintaining the same referent; a language independent strategy in discourse production. Turkish speakers, unlike Dutch speakers, used pronouns mainly to mark emphasis. Furthermore, Dutch but not Turkish speakers used pronouns differentially across the two videos. Thus, we argue that linguistic possibilities available in typologically different languages might tune speakers into taking different principles into account to establish coherence in narratives in pragmatically coherent ways.