This paper presents an experiment on the comprehension of the negative indefinite pronoun nessuno ('no one') in different syntactic structures in Italian children aged 4 to 6. Specifically, the study aimed at determining when the meaning of nessuno is acquired, as well as whether negative concord structures showing both the sentential negation non ('not') and postverbal nessuno (e.g., 'Non l'ha vinto nessuno', lit. 'Not it has won no one') are easier to compute and, therefore, acquired earlier than structures displaying only preverbal nessuno (e.g., 'Nessuno l'ha vinto', lit. 'No one it has won') - a prediction following from a decomposition analysis of negative indefinites coupled with the Transparency Principle. Forty Italian-speaking children completed a Truth Value Judgement Task from which it emerged that the comprehension of nessuno is already almost at ceiling at 4 years of age, and that no difference in accuracy rates holds between pre- and postverbal nessuno. Although these findings neither support nor refute our predictions - that is, that the more linguistic material realised, the easier the comprehension - they are particularly interesting as they provide evidence for an early acquisition of nessuno regardless of the syntactic context. This, in turn, corroborates the idea that the late mastery of the double negation reading of certain Italian sentences featuring a preverbal negative indefinite followed by the sentential negative marker non is not to be attributed to difficulties in the processing of the negative information conveyed by the indefinite itself. Rather, it is more likely due to the processing of double negation requiring increased working memory resources and involving the detection and integration of both pragmatic and prosodic cues.

This study investigated the comprehension of relative clauses in Chinese children (aged 6 years 10 months to 12 years 11 months) with developmental dyslexia and/or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and explored associations between relative clause comprehension and various linguistic and cognitive factors to enhance our understanding of syntactic processing in these populations. Twenty-two children with dyslexia, 30 with ADHD, 29 with comorbid dyslexia and ADHD, and 31 chronological age-matched typically developing (TD) controls completed a relative clause comprehension task (measuring both accuracy and response latency) and a battery of tasks assessing linguistic and cognitive abilities. All clinical groups showed more accurate performance on subject relative clauses (SRCs) than object relative clauses (ORCs). Children with dyslexia and those with comorbid dyslexia and ADHD did not differ significantly in accuracy or response latency on either SRCs or ORCs. Moreover, they demonstrated significantly lower ORC accuracy than TD controls, with the comorbid group additionally demonstrating longer SRC response latencies than TD controls. Children with ADHD also exhibited much slower response latency than TD controls, particularly for SRCs. Additionally, morphological awareness predicted relative clause comprehension across the clinical groups, whereas better verbal working memory predicted slower processing in ADHD but faster processing in the comorbid group. The observed SRC advantage aligns with the prediction of featural Relativized Minimality, where structural intervention (i.e. syntactic blocking by an intervening element) critically affects children's relative clause comprehension. The findings confirm the presence of syntactic difficulties in dyslexia and reveal novel evidence of syntactic challenges in ADHD. Morphological awareness and verbal working memory appear to play significant roles in sentence comprehension, highlighting their importance in clinical populations.

Abstract Sentences with plural expressions can be ambiguous between a collective interpretation, where a group of agents acts together on a single object, and a distributive interpretation, where individual members act separately on different objects. Previous studies have identified developmental differences in both interpretation preferences and the use of distributive markers such as universal quantifiers: adults prefer collective interpretations, while children show no clear preference between readings; moreover, children struggle with distributive quantifiers in both comprehension and production, while adults reliably use them when needed. This study is the first to compare both comprehension preferences and production patterns across three age groups: Italian-speaking preschoolers, second graders, and adults. In a picture selection task, participants chose between collective and distributive pictures in response to unmarked, distributive, or collective sentences. In a production task, they described scenes depicting either collective or distributive actions. Results showed that all groups—including, surprisingly, preschoolers—accurately comprehended both distributive and collective markers and interpreted unmarked sentences as collective. However, in production, adults and second graders were more likely to explicitly mark distributive rather than collective interpretations, while preschoolers rarely used any disambiguating expressions. We argue that these findings reflect a developmental shift in pragmatic competence rather than in lexical knowledge, contributing new insights into the interface between semantics, pragmatics, and language development.

Research on the acquisition of language's logical connectives has generally focused on production studies (spontaneous or elicited). According to such data, parts of the logical vocabulary - in particular, conjunction and disjunction - are acquired relatively late, with adult-like production evident from age 3 for conjunction and from age 6 for disjunction. In this study, we employed the intermodal preferential looking paradigm to target the comprehension abilities of Italian-speaking toddlers of an average age of 28 months, a younger cohort than in previous studies. We collected eye-fixation data as toddlers inspected two images whilst listening to conjunctive and disjunctive sentences and analysed these data with a generalised additive model, obtaining a sequential record of the online, implicit processing of the sentences. The results indicate that toddlers discriminate between conjunction and disjunction and favour an inclusive reading of disjunction, furthermore providing evidence for the earliest comprehension of the logical connectives in ontogeny.

This study investigates the comprehension and production of relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin-speaking preschool- and school-age children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Twenty-one children with DLD (aged 4;2-8;4) and 42 typically developing (TD) children (aged 3;10-8;0) were tested. The results revealed that children with DLD showed no asymmetry between subject RCs (SRCs) and object RCs (ORCs) in comprehension, but demonstrated an SRC advantage in production. They performed less accurately than TD children in both SRCs and ORCs, with TD children exhibiting a clear SRC advantage in both comprehension and production. Moreover, children with DLD displayed a discrepancy between comprehension and production of ORCs, and their working memory capacity was positively associated with RC production. These findings provide novel evidence that Mandarin-speaking children with DLD face significant challenges in acquiring both SRCs and ORCs, offering insights into the nature of syntactic deficits in DLD.

This study investigates the processing of subject and object direct questions headed by wh-elements such as chi (i.e. who) and quale-NP (i.e. which-NP) in Italian, a pro-drop language that allows post-verbal subjects. In Italian, chi and quale-NP questions are ambiguous: they can be interpreted as either subject or object, in the absence of morphological or pragmatic disambiguation. Using eye tracking techniques, we explore how different types of wh-elements (chi vs. quale-NP) and extraction sites (subject vs. object) are processed when disambiguated by number verbal agreement. A distinct processing pattern emerges between chi and quale-NP questions: while quale-NP questions generally demand more cognitive effort when encountering the verb, chi questions necessitate increased processing during post-verbal NP integration. Additionally, a wh-subject extraction preference is observed, which reflects an active gap filling strategy across types of wh-elements. These findings are discussed in terms of the processing mechanisms underlying the elaboration of wh-questions.

This paper investigates the different uses of the clitic si in Child Italian. Through a corpus study on spontaneous productions of children aged 1;4-3;4, we check whether all functions of si are realized by children and we give a new perspective from language acquisition to a long-standing debate, namely whether there exists only one type of si or whether there are many different ones. Our results show that Italian children use si productively and adult-like early on, and they produce all its different functions: impersonal, anticausative, true reflexive, and inherent reflexive – although at different rates. We claim that our results support the one si approaches, and the difference in the frequencies of si functions reflects the structural complexity of some structures.

There is cross-linguistic variation in the strategies languages use to answer polar questions. Specifically, languages differ in the type of answers that can be produced: only a response particle, only a continuation, or a combination of both. Among languages that allow response particles, there is further variation in how these are used to answer negative polar questions. In Positive-Negative languages, which Italian has been claimed to belong to, positive response particles are used to express positive polarity, whereas negative response particles mainly express negative polarity. This article experimentally investigates these two aspects of answers to polar questions in adult and child Italian. We do so by eliciting answers to both positive and negative polar questions and analyzing the type of answers that were given and their form. To our knowledge, this is the first study investigating the answering system in both positive and negative polar questions in adult and child Italian. Our results from adults suggest that Italian is mostly, but not strictly, a Positive-Negative language. In addition, we show that 4- to 5-year-old Italian children are able to answer positive and negative polar questions, behaving in line with adults, although they have yet to fully acquire the ability to produce mandatory continuations in certain contexts. Lastly, as a corollary result, we show that our data experimentally support the validity of the markedness scale in adult and child Italian: some responses are more marked than others and are mapped to more specialized forms.

Sentences with a plural subject receive a distributive reading if the predicate refers to the atomic members, or a collective one if it relates to the whole group. Previous accounts suggest that the distributive representation includes an additional semantic operator, and comprehension experiments show that adults interpret an ambiguous sentence as collective. However, children accept distributive readings more frequently, questioning their presumed greater difficulty. The current study investigates these interpretations in a novel way through a production study, where Italian adults and preschoolers described distributive and collective pictures. Adults produced more distributive expressions, in line with semantic theories and psycholinguistic findings. Preschoolers, however, showed limited sensitivity to the need for disambiguating markers, showing in particular that knowledge of distributive quantifiers is not fully acquired by the age of five, at least in the production domain. We discuss our results at the intersection of language acquisition, semantic theories, and cognitive development.

There is growing interest in understanding the relationship between language, music, and cognitive skills, particularly in typical and atypical populations, with implications for academic achievement and therapeutic interventions. While previous research has largely focused on correlating individual language and music skills, it often lacks a comprehensive approach to exploring the interactions among multiple variables. This study aimed to explore the predictors of beat perception and rhythm discrimination in typically developing children, with a focus on language and working memory abilities. We further used supervised and unsupervised learning techniques to explore sub-groups of participants with different performance. Thirty-seven typically developing monolingual Greek preschool children completed the protocol, covering language skills (morphosyntax production and morphosyntax and syntax comprehension, phonological awareness), cognitive (verbal and phonological working memory, visuospatial working memory), and music/temporal processing skills (melody and rhythm discrimination, beat perception). Our findings show that working memory was a significant predictor for rhythm discrimination, underscoring the possible implication of domain-general cognitive abilities. Language skills (morphosyntax production, morphosyntax and syntax comprehension, syllable manipulation) contributed minimally to predicting both beat perception and rhythm discrimination, with standardized effects indicating moderate associations in some cases. In reversing the direction of prediction, beat perception—but not rhythm discrimination—significantly predicted morphosyntax/syntax comprehension performance. Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) revealed individual differences within the sample, identifying two sub-groups with differing language and cognitive performance, emphasizing the need to further investigate individual variability in typically developing populations. These results suggest that beat perception and rhythm discrimination tap into different mechanisms, with working memory being critical for rhythm discrimination, and highlight the importance of distinguishing these constructs for future diagnostic and therapeutic applications. These findings need to be confirmed in future studies including larger sample sizes.

Anticipatory planning, that is, the ability to process information in advance to prepare to act, underpins activities that unfold in time, such as spoken language, reading and handwriting. One key, though not the only, mechanism that may facilitate anticipatory planning is rhythm, which is understood as the structured grouping of events in time. Research has identified impairments in the production and processing of rhythm in individuals with dyslexia, with individual differences in rhythmic skills explaining variability in language, reading and motor abilities. In this article, we synthesise behavioural evidence suggesting that language, reading and handwriting impairments associated with dyslexia may, to some extent, be linked to a deficit in anticipatory planning. We term this the Inefficient Anticipatory Planning Hypothesis . We discuss the need for further behavioural and neural research to clarify the nature of anticipatory planning across these domains, and the extent to which different mechanisms, such as rhythm, support it. Given the interplay between language and rhythmic skills and the comorbidity of dyslexia and developmental language disorder (DLD), extending this investigation to (developmental) language disorder could refine our understanding of the distinct and shared mechanisms that underlie these conditions.

This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (Italian ‘o’) in negative sentences by Italian monolingual and bilingual (L1 Italian – L2 English) children and Italian adults. Participants were asked to judge Italian sentences corresponding to the English sentence ‘This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper’. According to the Semantic Subset Principle (SSP), children’s initial scope assignment corresponds to the interpretation that makes sentences true in the narrowest range of circumstances (the ‘neither’ interpretation), even when this is not the interpretation assigned by adults. This study aimed to: (a) replicate previous findings, showing that Italian monolingual children display a binomial group distribution and possibly a three-stage developmental sequence, directly linked to their (delayed) sensitivity to the pragmatic inference of ‘exclusivity’; and (b) investigating whether exposure to a second language (in which the default value corresponds to the value expected by the SSP) may trigger attrition effects of the L2 on the L1 at a semantic level, leading children to primarily assign disjunction a –PPI value in Italian, influenced both by the SSP and L1 attrition. Results showed that Italian monolingual children were divided into two groups: one interpreted disjunction as taking scope over negation as adults did, while the other interpreted negation as taking scope over disjunction, as predicted by the SSP. In addition, they displayed the three-stage developmental pattern observed in prior research. All bilingual children, instead, systematically adopted a ‘neither’ interpretation of disjunction under negation in Italian, showing an attrition effect of the L2 (English) on the L1 (Italian) at the semantics level. We interpret these results as indicating that being exposed to an L2, while still being guided by the SSP, acts for bilingual children as a super-additive factor in setting the Disjunction Parameter in their L1.

While many theoretical proposals about the relationship between language and music processing have been proposed over the past 40 years, recent empirical advances have shed new light on this relationship. Many features are shared between language and music, inspiring research in the fields of linguistic theory, systematic musicology, and cognitive (neuro-)science. This research has led to many and diverse findings, making comparisons difficult. In the current review, we propose a framework within which to organise past research and conduct future research, suggesting that past research has assumed either domain-specificity or domain-generality for language and music. Domain-specific approaches theoretically and experimentally describe aspects of language and music processing assuming that there is shared (structure-building) processing. Domain-general approaches theoretically and experimentally describe how mechanisms such as cognitive control, attention or neural entrainment can explain language and music processing. Here we propose that combining elements from domain-specific and domain-general approaches can be beneficial for advances in theoretical and experimental work, as well as for diagnoses and interventions for atypical populations. We provide examples of past research which has implicitly merged domain-specific and domain-general assumptions, and suggest new experimental designs that can result from such a combination aiming to further our understanding of the human brain.

Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) have impaired morphosyntactic abilities despite age-appropriate nonverbal cognitive abilities and no hearing disorders or brain injury. The persistent omission of third-person object clitic pronouns (3DO clitics) has been proven to be a clinical marker of developmental language disorders (DLD) for both preschool and school-aged Italian-speaking children. According to the model of 3DO clitic derivation recently brought to attention, 3DO clitic omission is a morphosyntactic matter and, therefore, we argue that the production of 3DO clitics can be enhanced through morphosyntactic priming in children with DLD. To corroborate this hypothesis, we administered a 3DO clitic training based on a morphosyntactic priming paradigm to 23 typically developing (TD) children and 11 children with DLD. Results show that their 3DO clitic production is enhanced after the training and that these effects are persistent in time. Our results suggest that a priming-based training can concretely help children with DLD in their language development.

In questo articolo, discuteremo due aspetti dell'acquisizione bilingue: il meccanismo del transfer e il tempo di esposizione effettiva alla seconda lingua. Il primo consiste nel fatto che una proprietà linguistica acquisita nella prima lingua (L1) possa facilitare l'acquisizione della stessa anche nella seconda lingua (L2). In altri termini, nell'acquisizione della L2, i bambini possono beneficiare dall'aver già imparato proprietà analoghe nella L1. Discuteremo l'importanza del secondo nel valutare l'acquisizione di competenze linguistiche. Il tempo effettivo di esposizione può essere determinato solo sulla base di questionari dettagliati che indagano la situazione linguistica dei bambini. Per questo motivo parleremo anche di quali siano i questionari disponibili per l'italiano L2. Per trattare questi aspetti caratteristici dell'acquisizione bilingue, prenderemo in esame alcuni studi che hanno coinvolto bambini bilingui parlanti due lingue molto diverse tra loro: nello specifico, bambini con l'italiano come L2 e con l'arabo o il mandarino come L1. Nel primo caso ci concentreremo sull'acquisizione dei pronomi clitici che, essendo presenti sia in arabo che in italiano, possono quindi essere esemplificativi del meccanismo del transfer. Il confronto tra le prestazioni in italiano dei bambini arabofoni e quelle di bambini con altre L1 mostra che non solo il transfer, ma anche il tempo di esposizione effettiva alla L2 giocano un ruolo cruciale nell'acquisizione di questi pronomi. Successivamente ci concentreremo sull'italiano L2 di bambini con mandarino L1, analizzando l'acquisizione delle frasi relative, del numero e del genere grammaticale. Anche in questi casi esamineremo il ruolo facilitatore del transfer, ma lo faremo in due contesti leggermente diversi. Nel primo caso, infatti, le proprietà linguistiche in questione (cioè, le frasi relative e il numero grammaticale) sono presenti in entrambe le lingue; nel secondo, invece, l'aspetto linguistico analizzato (il genere grammaticale) viene espresso solo in una delle due (l'italiano).

This study examines the interpretation of logophoric and ordinary pronouns in Ewe. While the logophor yè is predicted to obligatorily refer to the attitude holder in indirect speech reports, the ordinary pronoun’s reference pattern remains debated. Thirty-eight Ewe speaking adults completed an acceptability judgment task evaluating pronoun usage in self and anti-self contexts for communicative (say) and mental (think) verbs. The findings align with the principle of Maximize Presupposition, assuming yè encodes a presupposition: yè is preferred when its presupposition is met, blocking the occurrence of the ordinary pronoun é. In turn, é is favored only where the presupposition of yè fails, though less robustly than yè.

Sentences with a plural subject receive a distributive reading if the predicate refers to the atomic members or a collective one if it relates to the whole group. Previous accounts suggest that the distributive representation includes an additional semantic operator, and comprehension experiments show that adults interpret an ambiguous sentence as collective. However, children accept distributive readings more often, questioning their presumed greater difficulty. The current study investigates these interpretations in a novel way through a production study. Italian adults and preschoolers described distributive and collective pictures. We found that adults produced more distributive expressions, in line with semantic theories and psycholinguistic findings. Children were not fully sensitive to the need to express markers disambiguating the two readings. However, when they recognised the difference between pictures, they produced more collective markers, different from adults. We discussed our results at the intersection of language acquisition, semantic theories, and cognitive development.

The increasing number of primary students with varying degrees of exposure to a family minority language requires a reflection on whether specific aspects of their daily language experience influence their learning. Indeed, Minority Language Children (MLC) often report difficulties in reading that must be better investigated to exclude neurodevelopmental conditions such as developmental dyslexia.To this aim, we developed a new instrument, the Daily Linguistic Practice Interview. It allows for collecting information about the linguistic practice and use in the family (Scale A) and extra-family context (Scale B), and about the child's linguistic preferences and habits (Scale C). The Interview further provides analogic quantitative measures of minority language active speaking with mother, father, and passive listening, in the form of clocks to paint.The relationship between these linguistic aspects and reading skills was investigated on 79 MLC aged 8 to 11 y.o.through a correlational approach and regression models. Our results show that family and extra-family language use influence accurate lexical recognition, moreover a “mother effect” broadly affects reading skills in the majority language.Our findings suggest that MLC deserve a more careful evaluation of learning disorders with ad hoc standardized tests, that incorporates information about the family language exposure.