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This chapter addresses the question of how children exploit different grammatical devices in comprehending relative clauses. It shows that comprehension of relative clauses follows different developmental patterns defined by the kind of device that cue a subject or an object relative clause interpretation.

This study provides new evidence concerning the pattern of acquisition of free and bound morphemes in Italian, based on the speech of 59 children recorded through a cross-sectional method. We found that inflectional morphology is mastered before free-standing morphology. Despite the great variety of verb inflections, the analyses showed that children partially master present indicative from early productions. Although free-standing morphemes are used correctly, they are optionally omitted. Here we have explored the use and omission of articles, clitics, the copula, and auxiliaries and have shown that omission is subject to certain constraints. Articles are mainly omitted from the root of the clause, much as null subjects, because from this position the requirement of clausal identification is voided. A higher omission of accusative clitics than dative clitics was observed that has also been explained in terms of the uniqueness checking constraint: accusative, but not dative clitics need to check the D feature twice, because the former, but not the latter, trigger past particle agreement. The uniqueness checking constraint has been adopted to explain the higher omission of auxiliaries with respect to the copula: the former, but not the latter, have to check the T feature twice. Together, these findings suggest that children omit, but in principled ways.

How children succeed in acquiring language, without apparent effort and following similar milestones, at a time when dressing, and eating without getting dirty are still problems, has been a central question in generative linguistics (Chomsky, 1957, 1959, 1975; Guasti, 2002) since its inception. This chapter will provide an answer to this question by adopting the Universal Grammar (UG) approach to language acquisition which presumes that language is what makes us humans and distinguishes us from non-human animals. We acquire language because it is part and parcel of our nature.

Article omission is known to be a feature of early grammar, although it does not affect all child languages to the same extent. In this article we analyze the production of articles by 12 children, 4 speakers of Catalan, 4 speakers of Italian, and 4 speakers of Dutch. We consider the results in the light of (i) the adult input the children are exposed to, (ii) the prosodic properties of articles in the three languages, and (iii) the properties of the syntax-semantics mapping of nouns in the languages under consideration. We show that the proportion of bare nouns (grammatical or ungrammatical) in the adult input does not bear any systematic relation to child production/omission of articles and that the full developmental pattern observed can be explained by appealing to the role of the nominal mapping parameter (NMP) in guiding acquisition, in conjunction with prosodic properties of articles and with discourse conditions.

Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms (some, might, or) (cf. Braine & Rumain, 1981; Smith, 1980). More recent studies suggest, however, that children's apparent failures may depend on the experimental demands (Papafragou & Musolino, 2003). Although previous studies involved children of different ages as well as different tasks, and are thus not directly comparable, nevertheless a common finding is that children do not seem to derive scalar implicatures to the same extent as adults do. The present article describes a series of experiments that were conducted with Italian speaking subjects (children and adults), focusing mainly on the scalar term some. Our goal was to carefully examine the specific conditions that allow the computation of implicatures by children. In so doing, we demonstrate that children as young as 7 (the youngest age of the children who participated in the Noveck study) are able to compute implicatures in experimental conditions that properly satisfy certain contextual prerequisites for deriving such implicatures. We also present further results that have general consequences for the research methodology employed in this area of study. Our research indicates that certain tasks mask children's understanding of scalar terms, not only including the task used by Noveck, but also tasks that employ certain explicit instructions, such as the training task used by Papafragou & Musolino (2003). Our findings indicate further that, although explicit training apparently improves children's ability to draw implicatures, children nevertheless fail to achieve adult levels of performance for most scalar terms even in such tasks, and that the effects of instruction do not last beyond the training session itself for most children. Another relevant finding of the present study is that some of the manipulations of the experimental context have an effect on all subjects, whereas others produce effects on just a subset of children. Individual differences of this kind may have been concealed in previous research because performance by individual subjects was not reported. Our general conclusions are that even young children (7-year olds) have the prerequisites for deriving scalar implicatures, although these abilities are revealed only when the conversational background is natural. © 2005 Psychology Press Ltd.

The interpretation of language is a complex phenomenon. One of the best established models maintains that language interpretation arises from the interaction of two major components. On the one hand, sentences are assigned truth conditions, which provide a characterization of propositional content and constitute the domain of semantics. On the other hand, use of propositional content (i.e., truth conditions) in concrete communication is governed by pragmatic norms. In speaking, not only do we pay attention to truth conditional content, we also aim at being cooperative and at saying something relevant to the situation. One way to study this intricate interplay between semantics and pragmatics is by looking at the way adults and children interpret logical words, for example, connectives and quantifiers. In particular, we would like to concentrate on Scalar Implicatures, inferences that we draw when we interpret sentences including certain logical words and that allow one to go beyond what is literally said in the sentence. For example, following Grice and much literature inspired by him, it can be argued that if a speaker says ‘Some students passed the exam’ the hearer is likely to assume that the speaker intended to convey that ‘Some students passed the exam, but not all did’. The addition of ‘but not all did’ is not, however, part of the truth conditions, but an implicature that arises from the way we use language.

This article evaluates two competing analyses of Italian (and Romance) interrogatives: The CP- and the IP-analysis. The CP-analysis is claimed to be superior to the IP-analysis. In agreement with the minimalist assumptions that movement is governed by a principle of procrastination, it is argued that Italian questions do not feature I-to-C movement before Spell-out. Subjects in interrogatives do not occur in the preverbal position. Moreover, they cannot occupy the postverbal Position, where they may be found in declaratives, but must occupy left- or right- peripheral positions. These two facts are the basis for claiming that the primitive property underlying the formation of Italian interrogatives is the pro-drop Status of this language. This will also be one of the ingredients for selecting the Italian grammar of interrogatives

We argue that early French relative clauses (RCs) with gaps involve movement, contrary to Labelle's (1990) conclusion, but that it is movement of the relative head, not of an operator. We suggest that children lack relative operators for maturational reasons (Wexler (1991)). Our account shows that the deviation of early RCs from adult grammar is due to this lacuna and is compensated for in a manner consistent with Universal Grammar (UG). This analysis explains the absence of "pied piping" and the preponderance of gaps in object relative clauses in Labelle's corpus. We assimilate relative clauses where the relativized NP occurs in situ to wh-in situ in French interrogatives. This is compatible with UG given that internally headed relative clauses are attested cross-linguistically. We consider child and adult Korean (Lee, Lust, and Whitman (1991)) in this context. This approach also captures Flynn and Lust's (1980) observation that free relatives are acquired earlier than restrictive relatives.

Natural languages dispose of two ways of realizing syntactic negation: (1) functional projection in the extended projection of the verb (NegP); (2) “adverbial” negation in small clauses and nominals, adjoined to AP and NP, respectively. Relevant evidedence concernc the co-occurrences of negation and negative adverbs, scope phenomena, and phonological properties of Italian non. A difference between Italian/French and English concerning the scope of negation in small clauses is traced back to LF-preposition stranding. With respect to licensing of negative quantifiers in simple and Neg-raising contexts, full clauses and small clauses display the same pattern. The Neg-criterion is claimed to also apply in small clauses, under dynamic agreement

Grodzinsky's Tree-Pruning Hypothesis can be extended to explain agrammatic comprehension disorders. Although agrammatism is evidence for syntactic modularity, there is no evidence for its anatomical modularity or for its localization in the frontal lobe. Agrammatism results from diffuse left hemisphere damage – allowing the emergence of the limited right hemisphere linguistic competence – rather than from damage to an anatomic module in the left hemisphere.

occurs in positive contexts, an implicature of exclusivity arises. By contrast when the disjunction operator occurs within the scope of a downward entailing linguistic expression, no implicature of exclusivity is computed. Investigations on children’s computation of scalar implicatures in the same contexts have led to a slightly different picture. In particular it has proven difficult to demonstrate that children compute scalar implicatures (in

The interpretation of language is a complex phenomenon. One of the best established models maintains that language interpretation arises from the interaction of two major components. On the one hand, sentences are assigned truth conditions, which provide a characterization of propositional content and constitute the domain of semantics. On the other hand, use of propositional content (i.e., truth conditions) in concrete communication is governed by pragmatic norms. In speaking, not only do we pay attention to truth conditional content, we also aim at being cooperative and at saying something relevant to the situation. One way to study this intricate interplay between semantics and pragmatics is by looking at the way adults and children interpret logical words, e.g., connectives and quantifiers. In particular, we would like to concentrate on Scalar Implicatures, inferences that we draw when we interpret sentences including certain logical words and that allow one to go beyond what is literally said in the sentence. For example, following Grice and much literature inspired by him, it can be argued that if a speaker says “Some students passed the exam” the hearer is likely to assume that the speaker intended to convey that “Some students passed the exam, but not all did”. The addition of “but not all did” is not, however, part of the truth conditions, but an implicature, that arises from the way we use language. Literally speaking, or as far as semantics is concerned, a sentence like “Some student passed the exam” can be true in a situation where, in fact, all students passed the exam. In this article, our goal is twofold. First, we would like to present a model, the Semantic Core Model, that challenges a way of interpreting Grice's proposal that has come to be dominant in the field. According to the dominant view, one first retrieves the semantics of a whole root sentence and then processes the implicatures associated with it (in a strictly modular way). The Semantic Core Model proposes, instead, that semantic and pragmatic processing takes place in tandem. Implicatures are factored in recursively, in parallel with truth conditions. Our second goal is to present experimental evidence from adults and children that is consistent with this new model.

In this paper, we aim at exploring the subject/object asymmetry by comparing the production of relative clauses by two groups of Italian children aged 5 and 9 years respectively. By focusing on quite different ages, we aim at providing some additional information about the development of object relative clauses. We will do so by using a different experimental set up than the one used in Belletti and Contemori (2010) and this might be the source of different outcomes and be revealing of some additional factor promoting the production of object relative clauses endowed with peculiar features. In most studies, subject and object relatives include reversible verbs with two animate arguments. Animacy has been claimed to play a role in the comprehension of object relative clauses by children (Arosio et al. 2011). In this study, we examine whether it also plays a role in production

We studied the recovery of clause structures in four agrammatic patients by performing a longitudinal analysis of their spontaneous production. We classified their utterances in terms of legitimacy of the syntactic structure and rate of subordination. The results show that, initially, patients omit verbs, avoid subordination, just employ present tense, and substitute finite verbs with infinitives. During the recovery they start employing other tenses and subordinate clauses and reduce the use of infinitives. Data suggest a mixed syntactic and morphological origin of the impairment. Assuming that phrasal representations are built bottom-up from an array of lexical items. we propose that syntactic structures recover stepwise, with the lower portion of the syntactic tree becoming accessible before higher portions. We claim that, despite superficial similarities between agrammatic and children's speech. e.g., use of infinitives instead of finite verbs, a unified account is not viable. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).