Introduction

This volume includes selected and adapted papers from The Romance Turn VII, held in Venice on October 1-3, 2015. As for previous edi-tions, the conference brought together researchers from across Europe and overseas with the aim of communicating results and developing further research in the acquisition of Romance languages. The selected papers focus on a broad range of topics which are at the heart of the current debate on language acquisition (clitic pro-nouns, left-dislocations, passives, relative clauses, wh-questions) in a number of different acquisition settings: L1 and L2 acquisition, bilin-gualism, typical and atypical development. In addition to syntax, the volume covers other modules of grammar: semantics, pragmatics, and phonology, and adds a perspective on language processing to the cur-rent discussion on the acquisition of Romance languages. It mainly focuses on Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Romanian, in a compara-tive perspective with other Romance languages (Catalan, European Portuguese, French, Spanish) and languages of other language families (English, German, Persian, Sesotho, Turkish, etc.). One contribution on bilinguals with Greek as one of the two languages opens a perspective on a Balkan non-Romance language which may be interesting to be compared with Romanian.