This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition ofthird-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languagesthat lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employclitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”), thus establishing a robustcross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results,indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required toselect a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment aswell as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the productionof pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child whoat age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk forlanguage impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as adevelopmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain crosslinguistic differences discussed in the article.