This paper investigates the bilingualism originating from the native competence of a standard language (Italian) and a vernacular non-standardized local dialect (henceforth, bilectalism). We report results on the comprehension and production of narrative stories by 44 3- to 5-year-old typically developing children exposed to both Italian and Vicentino from birth. Our findings show that all children produced and comprehended Italian. As for the dialect, children can comprehend Vicentino, despite not producing any dialectal element. The study further revealed an implicational scale in dialectal competence: if a child exhibits some productions with dialectal syntax, s/he also produces dialects at the phonological, morphological, and lexical levels. These findings are in line with the dialectological studies on adult speakers: dialectal competence should be arranged along a fine-grained continuum and the dialectal speaker should be considered as a multi-factorial notion. Our study extends this observation to children’s dialectal acquisition.

Theoretical accounts agree that German restrictive relative clauses (RCs) are integrated at the level of syntax as well as at the level of prosody (Brandt1990; Gärtner1998, 2002; Endriss and Gärtner2005; Catasso and Hinterhölzl2016; Sanfelici et al.2017) in both the default verb-final and the marked verb-second variant (referred to as iV2). Both variants are assumed to show the same prosodic pattern, i. e., prosodic integration into the main clause, and not unintegrated prosody, which would signal a sequence of two main clauses. To date strong empirical evidence for this close correspondence between prosody and syntax in RCs is missing. Findings regarding prosodic integration of verb-final RCs are not consistent, and research regarding the prosody of iV2 structures is very scarce. Using a delayed sentence-repetition task, our study investigated whether subordination is signaled by prosody in RCs in both the verb-final and the V2 variant in adults ( n = 21 n=21 ). In addition, we asked whether young language learners ( n = 23 n=23 ), who at the age of 3 have just started to produce embedded clauses, are already sensitive to this mapping. The adult responses showed significantly more patterns of prosodic integration than of prosodic non-integration in the V-final and the iV2 structures, with no difference between the two conditions. Notably, the child responses mirrored this adult behavior, showing significantly more patterns of prosodic integration than of prosodic non-integration in both V-final and iV2 structures. The findings regarding adults’ prosodic realizations provide novel empirical evidence for the claim that iV2 structures, just like verb-final RCs, show prosodic integration. Moreover, our study strongly suggests that subordination is signaled by prosody already by age 3 in both verb-final and V2 variants of RCs.

There is consensus that languages possess several grammatical variants satisfying the same conversational function. Nevertheless, it is a matter of debate which principles guide the adult speaker’s choice and the child’s acquisition order of these variants. Various proposals have suggested that frequency shapes adult language use and language acquisition. Taking the domain of nominal modification as its testing ground, this paper explores in two studies the role that frequency of structures plays for adults’ and children’s structural choices in German. In Study 1, 133 three- to six-year-old children and 21 adults were tested with an elicited production task prompting participants to identify an agent or a patient referent among a set of alternatives. Study 2 analyzed a corpus of child-directed speech to examine the frequency of passive relative clauses, which children, similar to adults, produced very often in Study 1. Importantly, passive relatives were found to be infrequent in the child input. These two results show that the high production rate of rare structures, such as passive relatives, is difficult to account for with frequency. We claim that the relation between frequency in natural speech and use of a given variant in a specific context is indirect: speakers may opt for the less grammatically complex computation rather than for the variant most frequently used in spontaneous speech.

This paper investigates the acquisition of prepositions in Italian looking at children’s early spontaneous speech. With a longitudinal study on the production of seven Italian-speaking children aged 1;7 to 3;4, we sought to determine the timing in which different prepositional items emerged in children’s speech. Following much acquisition research, the order of emergence is assumed to reveal how syntax develops during acquisition (Rizzi, 1993/1994; Pérez-Leroux & al., 2012; Friedmann, Belletti, & Rizzi, 2020). Our analysis revealed that children produced different prepositional items at different stages. Adverbial prepositions, i.e., prepositions lacking a lexicalized complement, were produced in an order following the semantic feature hierarchy proposed in Clark (1972). The development of prepositional items with a lexicalized complement was consistent with the geometry of the syntactic tree proposed in the cartographic literature (Cinque, 2010). Interestingly, our results are in line with previous findings on French and Spanish (Morgenstern & Sekali, 2009; Stewart 2015) but diverge from those reported for English (Littlefield, 2009). In this respect, the development of prepositions patterns alike with the acquisition of other functional morphemes that differentiates morphologically rich languages from those with a poorer functional inventory.  

This paper investigates to what extent adverbial causal clauses and relative clauses can be reduced as one and the same phenomenon. Whereas causal clauses have always posed a challenge for a unified account of relativization and adverbial subordination in theoretical studies, typological research has long demonstrated that causal clauses are diachronically connected to relative clauses as well as to adverbial subordinates that have been theoretically analysed as relative clauses. We argue that at least some causal clauses are underlyingly relative clauses over situations (see Arsenijević 2021). Our claim is supported by the diachronic development of the Italian subordinator siccome ‘because/since’, an univerbated form morphologically composed of two items, the comparative-similative wh-pronoun come ‘how’ and the demonstrative adverbial pronoun sì ‘so’. We demonstrate that the causal subordinator is derived from the comparative-similative one via a three-stage diachronic change which is formally captured in terms of type of movement and null elements (Kayne 2005, Cinque 2020b). In so doing, our paper extends a relative clause analysis to causal clauses and adds a novel path to the diachronic development of causal clauses.

The purpose was to contribute to the validation of the TFPI, a new tool to assess the phonetic development of Italian-speaking children aged 18–47 months. Since currently norm-referenced instruments for Italian are lacking, the TFPI would fill this gap. We recruited 52 monolingual children aged 24–47 months with typical development. They were administered the complete TFPI, i.e., a naming task and repetition task; however, only their performances from the naming task were analyzed. The sessions were audio-recorded, in order to be later segmented and annotated in Praat, then manually transcribed with IPA. These data were then imported into Phon, an extremely suitable software for conducting analyses of phonological and speech data. We compiled the Phonetic Inventory (PhI) and calculated the Percentage of Consonants Correct (PCC) for each child, taking into consideration the allophones of Italian, in order to not compute them as errors. Both the PhI and the PCC improve with age, while intersubjective variability progressively decreases. Additionally, we investigated the age of the acquisition of each phone, since this domain lacks robust scientific data. Finally, our results align with previous findings, which proves the reliability and validity of the TFPI, and provides new information about the PCC, for which there are no reference values for the Italian language.