112,039 research outputs found
Agreement in Italian SLI children: a comparison between Determiner-Noun, Subject-Verb and Object-Verb agreement
No full textIn this paper, we present the results of a new forced-choice task designed to test SLI children’s competence with three different agreement configurations: Determiner-Noun, Subject-Verb and Object-Verb agreement. Three populations of Italian-speaking children took part in the study and we compared the performance of a group of typically developing children with two groups of children diagnosed with phonological (P-SLI) or grammatical (G-SLI) Specific Language Impairment. Our study revealed that in this task the G-SLI group performed worse than the other two groups. We also found that the different agreement configurations under scrutiny introduced different degrees of complexity, with the Determiner-Noun condition being the easiest one. We discuss these results in relation to Clahsen’s (1997) Grammatical Agreement Deficit Hypothesis and to a more recent proposal presented in Moscati and Rizzi (2014). Furthermore, we also compared plural and singular S-V agreement morphology. Results indicate that in our comprehension task no extra cost is associated with plural morphology in none of the experimental groups
The Layered Syntactic Structure of the Complementizer System: Functional Heads and Multiple Movements in the Early Left-Periphery. A Corpus Study on Italian
No full textIn this paper we document the developmental trajectory of the complementizer system (CP-system) in Italian by looking at the earliest spontaneous production of eleven young children, whose transcriptions are available on CHILDES. We conducted a novel corpus analysis, tracking down a number of constructions in which the clausal left-periphery is activated. First, we considered the appearance of the different complementizer particles in the CP-system, which overtly realize the three distinct functional projections ForceP, IntP, and FinP. The analysis revealed that children acquiring Italian correctly use these complementizer particles already in the third year of life. Second, we looked for the simultaneous activation of different functional projections within the CP-system. We went through our corpus searching for complex sentences in which more than one constituent was moved to the left periphery. This option is allowed by the adult grammar of Italian and, as our search revealed, it is also attested in the grammar of young children. Soon after their second birthday, sequences in which a left-dislocated Topic and a Wh- element co-occur are attested, directly supporting the existence of a (high) Topic position above FocusP. Moreover, movement in general conforms to the constraints of the adult grammar, with no attested violation of obligatory inversion (a consequence of the Q-Criterion). Importantly, "why-questions" did not require inversion, much as in the adult grammar of Italian. Taken together, children's use of complementizer particles and their activation of multiple landing sites for movement show that 2-year-olds already possess a richly articulated functional structure of the CP-system, aligned to the layered adult structure. In concluding the paper, we also discuss some temporal differences between constructions activating high and low portions of the CP-system. In particular, we detect a temporal precedence for wh-questions over why-questions. Since the former activate a lower projection, this is consistent with the recently proposed Growing Trees hypothesis, according to which the development of the CP-system proceeds stepwise
“Nobody” isn’t in time: on-line processing of Negative Concord Items in Italian and its implications for the delay of double negation readings in young children
No full textThe paper presents novel findings on young children’s processing of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in Italian in preverbal position. This is a syntactic environment in which their interpretation is equivalent to the English Negative pronouns “Nobody/Nothing”. Eye movements show that by the age of 5 children have little troubles in accessing the correct interpretation of preverbal NCIs. However, their processing time lags behind positive universal quantifiers used as controls. This result is discussed in relation to a documented overgeneralization of Negative Concord in early grammars
What a thousand children tell us about grammatical complexity and working memory: A cross-sectional analysis on the comprehension of clitics and passives in Italian
No full textData from 996 Italian-speaking children were collected and analyzed to assess whether a movement-based notion of grammatical complexity is adequate to capture the developmental trend of clitics and passives in Italian. A second goal of the study was to address the relationship between working memory and syntactic development, exploring the hypothesis that higher digit span values predict better comprehension of complex matrix sentences. The results confirm the validity of a ranking of grammatical structures based on constituent movement, with both clitics and passives developing in parallel and later than canonical SVO sentences. Working memory also shows an effect on sentence comprehension in general, but standard measures (digit span forward/backward) do not show a selective advantage in handling complex constructions such as clitics and passives
The cartography of Negative Markers: why negation breaks the assumption of LF/PF isomorphism
No full textRecensione a V. A. Viora, La codificazione del diritto penale militare negli Stati sabaudi
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