Elicited production of cleft sentences in 6–10 year-old Italian-speaking children

Literature on the acquisition of cleft sentences is still scarce. The acquisition of cleft structures should, however, deserve more attention: they involve the same type of antecedent-gap relation as relative clauses, for which a huge amount of acquisitional data are available, contain cleft constituents, which are typically focalized, and require special discourse conditions to be used. As far as we know, there are no studies on child production of cleft sentences in Italian. In what follows, we report the findings from an elicited production task carried out with school-aged, Italian-speaking children, eliciting subject and object contrastive cleft sentences; these findings are compared with the results from a preference task eliciting relative clauses, run with the same children.