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The acquisition of Italian morphology: a reply to Hyams*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Elena Pizzuto  and
Maria Cristina Caselli
Elena Pizzuto
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychology, National Research Council, Rome
Maria Cristina Caselli*
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychology, National Research Council, Rome
*
Address for correspondence: Istituto di Psicologia, C.N.R., Via Nomentana, 56. 00161 Roma, Italy. Internet e-mail address: pizzuto@kant.irmkant.rm.cnr.it.
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Extract

In Pizzuto & Caselli (1992, hereafter: P&C) we provided an overview of morphological development in Italian, focusing on three aspects of free speech production (verbs, pronouns and articles), in the longitudinal records of three children. We analysed our data using criteria appropriate to allow reliable cross-linguistic comparisons with data from English. By this means we evaluated the plausibility of a nativist, parameter-setting account of language development in Italian and English, as proposed for these two languages by Hyams (1986a b; 1987; 1988). We concluded that our data did not support the strong predictions made within such a parameter-setting account, and that the developmental patterns observed were best explained by a combination of cognitive, perceptual and distributional factors of the sort that are proposed in most other models of language acquisition.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , October 1993 , pp. 707 - 712
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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Footnotes

[*]

We thank Elizabeth Bates, Ruth Berman, Nancy Downer, Hermina Sinclair, Edy Veneziano and Virginia Volterra for helpful comments and suggestions. Partial financial support was provided by the C.N.R. ‘FATMA’ project. Some of the observations reported in this note also appear, in a different form, in Pizzuto & Caselli (in press).

References

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