On the acquisition of Italian restrictive relative clauses in typical and atypical development

This work presents the results of an elicited production experiment on Italian restrictive relative clauses, administered to 116 children aged 6-10 with typical development, and 14 children with atypical development aged 6-11 (7 with a diagnosis of dyslexia, 7 with suspected dyslexia, that is with evident school difficulties). The experiment was conceived within a wider project held at the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, aiming at eliciting different syntactic structures (cleft sentences, relative clauses, direct wh-questions and passive sentences) in the same groups of children. In our work, we concentrate on the acquisition of relative clauses, analyzing important asymmetries between typical and atypical development. Moreover, we present two task modifications included in Novogrodsky and Friedmann’s (2006) Preference Task, initially designed for Hebrew and adapted for several experiments on Italian (Utzeri, 2006; 2007; Volpato, 2010; Contemori, 2011; Guasti et al., 2012). Differently from the studies quoted above, we also analyzed the asymmetries between gap and resumptive ORs, regarding the status of the head (demonstrative pronoun quello/lexical DP) and the position of embedded subjects (preverbal/post-verbal). Importantly, this is the first study on Italian presenting data on the nature of the relative head, and the differences in elicited production between TD children and children with Developmental Dyslexia.