Reduced forms such as the pronoun "he" provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as "the lead singer of Coldplay." Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade-off between the informativity…

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as…

This paper investigates the interpretation that Italian-speaking children and adults assign to negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction. The aim of the study was to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretation to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al.,…

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a heterogeneous disorder affecting various aspects of language. While most studies have investigated impairments in the domain of syntax and morphosyntax, little is known about compositional semantics and the process of deriving pragmatic meanings in SLI. We selected a group of sixteen monolingual…

The study investigated morphosyntactic abilities and semantic-pragmatic competence in 24 children with developmental dyslexia aged 7-12 years. Morphosyntactic abilities were investgated in a direct object clitic production task, semantic-pragmatic competence in a quantifier comprehension task. Children with dyslexia produced fewer clitics than…

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…