Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-kp629 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-30T00:28:33.071Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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: flavia.adani@ens.fr
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Information

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

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

REFERENCES

Adani, F., Guasti, M. T., Forgiarini, M. & van der Lely, H. K. J. (submitted). The impact of the number feature on Relative Clause comprehension in development: Insight from typically developing children and children with specific language impairment.Google Scholar
Arnon, I. (2005). Relative clause acquisition in Hebrew: Towards a processing-oriented account. Paper presented at the Boston University Child Language Development Conference, Boston.Google Scholar
Arosio, F., Adani, F. & Guasti, M. T. (2005). Processing grammatical features by Italian children. In Belletti, A., Bennati, E., Chesi, C. & Ferrari, I. (eds), Acquisition and development. Proceedings of GALA 2005, 15–27. Siena: Cambridge Scholars Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Corrêa, L. M. S. (1995). An alternative assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 24(3), 183–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crain, S., McKee, C. & Emiliani, M. (1990). Visiting relatives in Italy. In Frazier, L. & de Villiers, J. (eds), Language processing and language acquisition, 335–56. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crain, S., Ni, W. & Shankweiler, D. (2001). Grammatism. Brain & Language 77, 294–304.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
de Villiers, J. G., Tager Flusberg, H. B., Hakuta, K. & Cohen, M. (1979). Children's comprehension of relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 8(5), 499–518.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
De Vincenzi, M. (1991). Syntactic parsing strategies in Italian: The Minimal Chain Principle (Vol. 12). Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Vincenzi, M. (1996). Test di comprensione delle frasi interrogative soggetto/oggetto in italiano. Rome: Istituto di Psicologia del CNR.Google Scholar
De Vincenzi, M., Arduino, L., Ciccarelli, L. & Job, R. (1999). Parsing strategies in children's comprehension of interrogative sentences. Paper presented at the European Conference on Cognitive Science, Siena.Google Scholar
Diessel, H. & Tomasello, M. (2000). The development of relative clauses in spontaneous child speech. Cognitive Linguistics 11(1/2), 131–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diessel, H. & Tomasello, M. (2005). A new look at the acquisition of relative clauses. Language 81, 882–906.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, P. (2008). Models of accuracy in repeated-measures designs. Journal of Memory and Language 59(4), 447–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenberg, S. (2002). Interpretation of relative clauses by young children: Another look. Journal of Child Language 29, 177–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Franck, J., Lassi, G., Frauenfelder, U. H. & Rizzi, L. (2006). Agreement and movement: A syntactic analysis of attraction. Cognition 101(1), 173–216.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frazier, L. & Fodor, J. D. (1978). The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model. Cognition 6, 291–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedmann, N., Belletti, A. & Rizzi, L. (2009). Relativized relatives. Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua 119, 67–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedmann, N. & Novrogodsky, R. (2004). The acquisition of relative clause comprehension in Hebrew: A study of SLI and normal development. Journal of Child Language 31, 661–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garraffa, M. & Grillo, N. (2008). Canonicity effects as grammatical phenomena. Journal of Neurolinguistics 21, 177–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68, 1–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goodluck, H. & Tavakolian, S. L. (1982). Competence and processing in children's grammar of relative clauses. Cognition 11, 1–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gordon, P., Hendrick, R. & Johnson, M. (2004). Effects of noun phrase type on sentence complexity. Journal of Memory and Language 51, 97–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grillo, N. (2009). Generalized Minimality: Feature impoverishment and comprehension deficits in agrammatism. Lingua 119, 1426–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guasti, M. T. (1993/1994) Verb syntax in Italian child grammar: Finite and non-finite verbs. Language Acquisition 3, 1–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guasti, M. T., Branchini, C. & Arosio, F. (submitted). Interference in the production of Italian subject and object wh-questions.Google Scholar
Guasti, M. T. & Cardinaletti, A. (2003). Relative clause formation in Romance child's production. Probus 15, 47–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guasti, M. T. & Rizzi, L. (2002). Agreement and tense as distinct syntactic positions. Evidence from acquisition. In Cinque, G. (ed.), Functional structure in DP and IP—the cartography of syntactic structures (Vol. 1), 167–94. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamburger, H. & Crain, S. (1982). Relative acquisition. In Kuczaj, S. (ed.), Language development, vol.1: Syntax and semantics, 245–74. Hillsdale: NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Heim, I. & Kratzer, A. (1998). Semantics in generative grammar: Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language 59(4), 447–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kidd, E. (2003). Relative clause comprehension revisited: Commentary on Eisenberg (2002). Journal of Child Language 30, 671–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mak, W. M., Vonk, W. & Schriefers, H. (2002). The influence of animacy on relative clause processing. Journal of Memory and Language 47(1), 50–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKee, C., McDaniel, D. & Snedeker, J. (1998). Relatives children say. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 27, 573–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rizzi, L. (1986). Null objects in Italian and the theory of pro. Linguistic Inquiry 17(3), 501–557.Google Scholar
Rizzi, L. (1990). Relativized Minimality (Vol. 16): Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rizzi, L. (2004). Locality and left periphery. In Belletti, A. (ed.), Structure and beyond, 223–51. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, L. (2005). On the grammatical basis of language development: A case study. In Cinque, G. & Kayne, R. (eds), Oxford handbook of comparative syntax, 70–109. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rizzi, L. (2006 a). Grammatically-based target-inconsistencies in child language. In Deen, K. U., Nomura, J., Schulz, B. & Schwartz, B. D. (eds), Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition—North America (GALANA) (Vol. 4). Connecticut: University of Connecticut Occasional Papers in Linguistics.Google Scholar
Rizzi, L. (2006 b). On the form of chains: Criterial positions and ECP effects. In Cheng, L. & Corver, N. (eds), Wh-movement moving on, 97–134. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sheldon, A. (1974). The role of parallel functions in the acquisition of relative clauses in English. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13, 272–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobin, D. (1971). Developmental psycholinguistics. In Dingwall, W. O. (ed.), A survey of linguistic science, 298–411. College Park, MD: University of Maryland Linguistics Program.Google Scholar
Stavrakaki, S. (2001). Comprehension of reversible relative clauses in specifically language impaired and normally developing Greek children. Brain and Language 77, 419–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tavakolian, S. L. (1981). The conjoined-clause analysis of relative clauses. In Tavakolian, S. L. (ed.), Language acquisition and linguistic theory, 165–86. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Traxler, M. J., Morris, R. K. & Seely, R. E. (2002). Processing of subject and object relative clauses: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language 47, 69–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Utzeri, I. (2007). The production and acquisition of subject and object relative clauses in Italian: A comparative experimental study. Paper presented at Nanzan Linguistics 2: Research Results and Activities.Google Scholar
Volpato, F. & Adani, F.(in preparation). The subject/object relative clause asymmetry in hearing impaired children: Evidence from a comprehension task.Google Scholar