Infants' sensitivity to transitional probabilities (TPs) supports language development by facilitating mapping high-TP (HTP) words to meaning, at least up to 18 months of age. Here we tested whether this HTP advantage holds as lexical development progresses, and infants become better at forming word--referent mappings. Two groups of 24-month-olds…

In a recent article published in this journal, Moscati and Crain (M&C) showcase the explanatory power of a learnability constraint called the Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al. 1994). If correct, M&C's argument would represent a compelling demonstration of the operation of an innate, domain specific, learning principle. However,…

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.,…

This study examined Italian 7- to 9-year-olds' understanding of the connective "but" when used to relate two events in sentences embedded in short stories. Performance was largely accounted for by the cognitive complexity of the sentence that included the connective and the salience of its meaning (confirmed in a second study with…

Negative sentences with epistemic modals (e.g., John "might" not come/John "can" not come) contain two logical operators, negation and the modal, which yields a potential semantic ambiguity depending on scope assignment. The two possible readings are in a subset/superset relation, such that the strong reading ("can…

The study aimed at investigating the role of nominal gender in animal categorization in preschoolers. Given the regularities characterizing gender system, at both syntactical and morphological level, Italian language is suitable to address this issue. In three experiments, participants were asked to classify pictures of animals as male or female.…

We report on the case of an elderly bilingual woman presenting with a diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia. The participant's native language was Friulian (L1), a predominantly oral Romance language, and her second language was Italian (L2), formally learned at primary school in oral and written forms. We investigated her linguistic abilities…

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…

Three experiments investigated whether linguistic and/or attentional constraints might account for preschoolers' difficulties when learning color terms. Task structure and demands were equated across experiments, and both speed and degree of learning were compared. In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds who were matched on vocabulary score were taught new…

It is argued that the general consensus of researchers of child language that the grammatical system underlying the child's earliest multiword utterances is semantically-based, fails to provide an adequate description of even the earliest multiword utterances, and that the most sparing account of the acquisition data must include reference to…

Analyzes ellipsis, pronominalization, emphatic stress, the indefinite article, the definite article, and initialization as used by child and adult speakers of English, Hungarian, and Italian. Conclusions: marked differences between the languages; early learning of the functions of the devices; some changes with age. (Author/EJS)

Examines naturalistic adult-to-child speech of Italian middle class mothers to determine which patterns characterize linguistic input to infants. Because Italian is a pro-drop language, adult-to-child speech revealed bias toward more salient semantic and morphological significance of verbs relative to nouns, and verbs will likely occupy…

This study documents the instances of code-switching and interference in the speech of a bilingual child living in Rome, Italy, with his American mother and Italian father. (CFM)

This study analyzes two versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" as told by a bilingual three-year-old girl in English. (CFM)

Cross-sectional and longitudinal acquisition data for English, German, Italian, and Turkish children ranging in age from approximately 1 to 4 provide a preliminary answer to the question of whether there is a consistent interlanguage order of development of notions of conjunction. It was found that children first conjoin sentences by simple…