Noveck ( 2001 Noveck, I. 2001. When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicatures. Cognition, 78: 168–188. [Google Scholar] ) 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 Braine, M. and Roumain, B. 1981. Children's comprehension of “or”: Evidence for a sequence of competencies. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 31: 46–70. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ; Smith, 1980 Smith, C. L. 1980. Quantifier and question answering in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 30: 191–205. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ). More recent studies suggest, however, that children's apparent failures may depend on the experimental demands (Papafragou & Musolino, 2003 Papafragou, A. and Musolino, J. 2003. Scalar implicatures at the semantic-pragmatics interface. Cognition, 80: 253–282. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ). 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 Papafragou, A. and Musolino, J. 2003. Scalar implicatures at the semantic-pragmatics interface. Cognition, 80: 253–282. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ). 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.

Background. Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is frequent in childhood and may have long-term sequelae. By employing an evidence-based approach, this scoping review aims at identifying (a) early predictors of DLD; (b) the optimal age range for the use of screening and diagnostic tools; (c) effective diagnostic tools in preschool children. Methods. We considered systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and primary observational studies with control groups on predictive, sensitivity and specificity values of screening and diagnostic tools and psycholinguistic measures for the assessment of DLD in preschool children. We identified 37 studies, consisting of 10 systematic reviews and 27 primary studies. Results. Delay in gesture production, receptive and/or expressive vocabulary, syntactic comprehension, or word combination up to 30 months emerged as early predictors of DLD, a family history of DLD appeared to be a major risk factor, and low socioeconomic status and environmental input were reported as risk factors with lower predictive power. Optimal time for screening is suggested between age 2 and 3, for diagnosis around age 4. Because of the high variability of sensitivity and specificity values, joint use of standardized and psycholinguistic measures is suggested to increase diagnostic accuracy. Conclusions. Monitoring risk situations and employing caregivers’ reports, clinical assessment and multiple linguistic measures are fundamental for an early identification of DLD and timely interventions.

Children's pragmatic competence in deriving conversational implicatures (and scalar implicatures in particular) offers an intriguing standpoint to explore how developmental, methodological, and purely theoretical perspectives interact and feed each other. In this paper, we focus mainly on developmental and methodological issues, showing that children from age 6 on are adult-like in deriving the scalar implicature related to the scalar quantifier some (i.e. they interpret some as some but not all), while children at age 4 and 5 only sometimes reject underinformative-some in a classical Truth Value Judgment Task (Experiment 1). They do so despite their excellent performance in pragmatic tasks that evaluate their competence with the rules of talk exchange, such as the Conversational Violations Test (Experiment 4) and the Felicity Judgment Task (Experiment 5). To give children a better chance to reject underinformative-some when all is at stake, we manipulated the experimental design and materials in three different ways: 1) in Experiment 2, we tested the partitive alcuni dei (some of) instead of the bare quantifier qualche (some); 2) in Experiment 3, we attempted to prime the scale by asking children to judge a correct statement with all before the critical underinformative statement with some; 3) in Experiment 6, we aimed at making children more aware of the ambiguity of some, between its basic meaning (at least some, possibly all) and its strengthened meaning (some but not all). A surprising improvement is recorded in the last experiment, in which the rejection of underinformative-some by 5-year-old children rose to 72.5% (it was 42% in Experiment 1). We suggest that the children's low performance with scalar inference might be linked to the interplay of different factors as in the development of other general cognitive abilities, such as the ability to change one's strategy ( Shallice, 1982 Shallice, T. 1982. Specific impairments of planning. Philosophical Transcripts of the Royal Society of London B, 298: 199–209. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ) or to shift one's perspective ( Gopnik & Rosati, 2001 Gopnik, A. and Rosati, A. 2001. Duck or rabbit? Reversing ambiguous figures and understanding ambiguous reference. Developmental Science, 4(2): 174–182. [Crossref] [Google Scholar] ), the maturation of the lexicon ( Barner & Bachrach, 2010 Barner, D. and Bachrach, A. 2010. Inference and exact numerical representation in early language development. Cognitive Psychology, 60(1): 40–62. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ), and especially their great sensitivity to the task, methodology and materials used to test their pragmatic abilities.

The Relativized Minimality approach to A′-dependencies (Friedmann et al., 2009) predicts that headed object relative clauses (RCs) and which—questions are the most difficult, due to the presence of a lexical restriction on both the subject and the object DP which creates intervention. We investigated comprehension of center-embedded headed object RCs with Italian children, where Number and Gender feature values on subject and object DPs are manipulated. We found that, Number conditions are always more accurate than Gender ones, showing that intervention is sensitive to DP-internal structure. We propose a finer definition of the lexical restriction where external and syntactically active features (such as Number) reduce intervention whereas internal and (possibly) lexicalized features (such as Gender) do so to a lesser extent. Our results are also compatible with a memory interference approach in which the human parser is sensitive to highly specific properties of the linguistic input, such as the cue-based model (Van Dyke, 2007).

Based on an analysis of natural production data, I show that Italian children, at a young age, distinguish between finite and infinitival verbs. The evidence comes from the distribution of these two classes of verbs and from the placement of clitic (atonic) pronouns. I argue that, from the earliest stages, Italian children have knowledge of the verbal agreement system, a claim supported by a quantitative analysis of the verbal agreement paradigm. These results—evaluated in the framework of 'the principles and parameters theory of grammar—are naturally interpreted as evidence that the initial structure of children's sentences includes functional categories, specifically the Inflectional Phrase.

Article Relative clause formation in Romance childs production was published on April 23, 2003 in the journal Probus (volume 15, issue 1).