The timing of production

Emanuela Sanfelici,Camilla Gallina

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.137

Abstract

This paper investigates the acquisition of prepositions in Italian looking at children’s early spontaneous speech. With a longitudinal study on the production of seven Italian-speaking children aged 1;7 to 3;4, we sought to determine the timing in which different prepositional items emerged in children’s speech. Following much acquisition research, the order of emergence is assumed to reveal how syntax develops during acquisition (Rizzi, 1993/1994; Pérez-Leroux & al., 2012; Friedmann, Belletti, & Rizzi, 2020). Our analysis revealed that children produced different prepositional items at different stages. Adverbial prepositions, i.e., prepositions lacking a lexicalized complement, were produced in an order following the semantic feature hierarchy proposed in Clark (1972). The development of prepositional items with a lexicalized complement was consistent with the geometry of the syntactic tree proposed in the cartographic literature (Cinque, 2010). Interestingly, our results are in line with previous findings on French and Spanish (Morgenstern & Sekali, 2009; Stewart 2015) but diverge from those reported for English (Littlefield, 2009). In this respect, the development of prepositions patterns alike with the acquisition of other functional morphemes that differentiates morphologically rich languages from those with a poorer functional inventory.

Highlights

Various acquisition studies have investigated the development of syntax, concluding that not all syntactic structures are available to the child in the early stages of acquisition (e.g., Brown, 1973; Rizzi, 1993/1994; Radford, 1995)
Previous studies on the acquisition of prepositions mainly dealing with data from spontaneous speech have reported two general findings: (a) there is a divide between functional and lexical prepositions in their emergence in children’s production; (b) the production of lexical prepositions is constrained by the semantic feature hierarchy proposed in Clark (1973), according to which simpler relations are acquired before more complex ones
Timing observations have played an important role in our understanding of language acquisition

Summary

Introduction

Various acquisition studies have investigated the development of syntax, concluding that not all syntactic structures are available to the child in the early stages of acquisition (e.g., Brown, 1973; Rizzi, 1993/1994; Radford, 1995). By adopting a cartographic approach to syntax, where semantic information is uniformly mapped onto the syntactic tree, syntactic complexity and conceptual complexity proceed in parallel According to this view, children’s developmental stages follow the geometry of the syntactic tree with functional heads encoding more basic features being produced earlier than those specified for additional and more specific features (see Mitrofanova, 2016; Friedmann, Rizzi & Belletti, 2020). Prepositions provide an interesting domain to test how early syntax develops because they have a rich internal structure comprising different layers in which lexical and functional items are merged (Svenonius, 2008; Cinque, 2010; Garzonio & Rossi, 2020; a.o.).

The classification of prepositions

Previous acquisition studies

Our study: a corpus analysis of child spontaneous speech

Discussion