Through two elicited production experiments we investigated how preschool Italian-speaking children access the left periphery of the clause with respect to topics in Clitic Left Dislocation (ClLD) structures. Since the discourse conditions of the experiments are felicitous for the production of passives as well, we also investigated children's…

Acquisitionists generally assume a relation between code-mixing in young bilingual and trilingual children and language dominance. In our cross-sectional study we investigated the possible relation between code-mixing and language dominance in 122 children raised in Spain or Germany. They were bilingual, trilingual or multilingual, the latter…

Summarizes a case study of the bilingual development (Italian/English) of a child in Australia. Data consist of recordings of her natural interactions from 18 months to her fourth birthday. The study focuses on how Christina learns the strategies of everyday interaction in the two languages. This is the first study to use the Systemic Functional…

Reports on an experiment to check whether the use of articles by Italian preschool children corresponds to that of their English counterparts and on a second experiment to investigate the probability that subjects might produce the correct response distribution by following a rule based on the speaker's familiarity with the referent, not the…

Describes the development of the concept of language in an Italian/English bilingual child from age 2.0 to 2.5 years. (CFM)

Discusses research that gathered language samples via videotape recordings from 2 Italian children (one upper class, the other lower class) from the age of 18 months to 36 months, and then analyzes the data to determine the development of morphology and syntax in these children. (19 references) (CFM)

The purpose of this study was to attempt to verify the theory of Taeschner and Volterra (1976) that bilingual children pass through three distinct phases while becoming perfectly bilingual. The 12 subjects were English-Italian bilingual children between the ages of 1.6 and 4.6. (CFM)

This study analyzes a corpus of 1500 sentences uttered by a child bilingual in Italian and German between the ages of 3.9 and 4.5. Only 89 sentences show instances of lexical interference. (CFM)

Explores role of discourse functions in children's use of "because" ("perche" in Italian). Disputes of 172 preschoolers were analyzed in terms of interactive move, argumentative strategies, and communicative acts. Results showed causal connective tends to co-occur with justification acts and may work as device introducing new information and…

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…

A study was conducted in 1972-73 in Berkeley, Rome, Dubrovnik, and Istanbul, in order to examine the differences and similarities in the sequence of the development of locative expressions in English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. The subjects consisted of 48 two-, three-, and four-year-olds in each field site. Groups of three girls and…

Children and adults speaking English, Hungarian, and Italian were asked to describe sets of pictures which manipulated the pragmatic category of givenness. The working hypothesis was that there exist rule-governed relations between the perception of certain categorical aspects of the communicative situation and the use of certain conventional…