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Rethinking the acquisition of relative clauses in Italian: towards a grammatically based account*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2009

FLAVIA ADANI
FLAVIA ADANI*
Affiliation:
Psychology Department, University Milano-Bicocca
*
Address for correspondence: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP), Ecole Normale Supérieure, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France. tel: +33144322619; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In a number of studies, the acquisition of restrictive relative clauses (RCs) shows contrasting findings regarding comprehension and production, with the former usually delayed up to the age of five. As previously claimed in the literature, we suggest that this delay is a task artifact and we present a new procedure for the assessment of restrictive RCs. Data from three- to seven-year-old Italian children were collected and results show that children understand object RCs with preverbal subject in an adult-like manner at four years of age, but some of the three-year-old children were already above chance. Subject relatives show at ceiling performance from three years of age. We consider our results as evidence of continuity between early and adult competence grammars. Children's non-target responses are interpreted as grammatical options exploited by an immature performance system.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 141 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

[*]

The work presented in this paper was supported by a PhD fellowship from University Milano-Bicocca, which is gratefully acknowledged. This experimental method was presented at the COST meeting on cross-linguistic methodologies for the assessment of relative clauses held in Berlin in February 2007. A preliminary version of the data was presented at the 27th West Cost Conference in Formal Linguistics held at UCLA. Participation in this conference was supported by the grant ‘Tratti grammaticali e semantici nell'uso e nell'acquisizione del linguaggio’ awarded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. I also want to express my gratitude to: all the children who participated in the study, their parents and their teachers; Stefania Scalmati, Sara Toppi, Daniela Brienza and Nella Biressi for helping me out with the data collection; Ivano Caponigro and the UCLA Psychobabble's audience for their insightful comments; Maria Teresa Guasti and Nina Hyams for reading previous drafts. All remaining errors are, of course, my own.

References

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