Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T18:14:25.722Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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

REFERENCES

Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages (2nd edn). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Villiers, J. G. & de Villiers, P. A. (1973). A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2, 267–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hyams, N. M. (1986 a). Core and peripheral grammar and the acquisition of inflections. Paper presented at the Eleventh Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA.Google Scholar
Hyams, N. M. (1986 b). Language acquisition and the theory of parameters. Dordrecht: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyams, N. M. (1987). The theory of parameters and syntactic development. In Roeper, T. & Williams, E. (eds). Parameter setting. Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar
Hyams, N. M. (1988). A principles-and-parameters approach to the study of child language. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 27, 153–61.Google Scholar
Hyams, N. M. (1992). Morphosyntactic development in Italian and its relevance to parameter-setting models: comments on the paper by Pizzuto & Caselli. Journal of Child Language 19, 695–709.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacWhinney, B. (1991). The CHILDES Project. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Pizzuto, E. & Caselli, M. C. (1992). The acquisition of Italian morphology: implications for models of language development. Journal of Child Language 19, 491–557.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pizzuto, E. & Caselli, M. C. (in press). The acquisition of Italian verb morphology in a crosslinguistic perspective. In Levy, Y. (ed.), Other children, other languages. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar