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…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

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…

In a number of studies, the acquisition of restrictive relative clauses (RCs) shows contrasting findings regarding comprehension and production, with the former usually delayed up to the age of five. As previously claimed in the literature, we suggest that this delay is a task artifact and we present a new procedure for the assessment of…

Morphosyntactic skills in spontaneous and elicited production of a 7-year-old boy with specific language impairment (SLI) were examined and compared to those of younger, mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched, typically-developing children. This study focused on inflectional phrase structures as well as complex constructions in order to…

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenon of morphological variability in the production of Italian determiners, descriptive adjectives, and direct object pronouns by adult English learners of Italian to determine whether morphological errors are the result of computational or representational difficulties. Second language acquisitionists do…

Analysis of two Restructuring constructions in Italian, "equi" and "raising" structures, suggests that while lexical functional grammar (LFG) does not offer the kind of analysis previously used on this kind of structure, it does offer an insightful and interesting analysis of Restructuring in Italian. This approach treats…

Examines reflexivization in Italian and demonstrates that the proposals that (1) reflexive pronouns and their antecedents must be clausemates, and (2) the specified subject and tensed-S conditions, cannot be maintained as universals. (AM)

Idiomatic or complex prepositions, phrases that perform the same functions as simple prepositions, are examined in Italian. The analysis is of only one subgroup of idiomatic prepositional phrases, preposition + noun, and looks for classification criteria of theoretical rather than descriptive value. It is concluded that the idiosyncratic behavior…

Italian pedagogical texts in general hold the position that the partitive is not obligatory as it is in French. However, some of these texts devote a great deal of time to repetition and transformation drills while others never mention the construction at all until the chapters on the pronoun replacement of accusative complements. Italian phrase…

DESIGNED AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION FOR PROFESSIONALS PREPARING INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS, PLANNING COURSES, OR DEVELOPING CLASSROOM TECHNIQUES FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE PROGRAMS, A SERIES OF STUDIES HAS BEEN PREPARED THAT CONTRASTS, IN TWO VOLUMES FOR EACH OF THE FIVE MOST COMMONLY TAUGHT FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN THE UNITED STATES, THE SOUND AND GRAMMATICAL…