The comprehension and production of relative clauses in Italian: an investigation in 5-to-17-year-old children and adolescents

Abstract

In this study, I investigate the comprehension and production of restrictive subject and object relative clauses in a group of Italian-speaking typically-developing children and adolescents (age: from 5 to 17 years old). Data were collected using an agent selection task and an elicitation task. In comprehension, I found the typical asymmetry between subject and object relatives, namely subject relatives are easier than object relatives; particularly, object relatives with a preverbal subject are easier than object relatives with a post-verbal subject. Results showed that accuracy increases with age. The same asymmetry between subject and object relatives was attested in the production task. Moreover, results showed that the subjects tended to resort to different strategies in order to avoid the production of targeted object relatives, depending on their age. Whereas the most adopted strategy by adolescents was the production of passive relatives, followed by causative constructions and ambiguous sentences, children employed a greater number of strategies as for example: the use of resumptive pronouns and resumptive full DPs, the transformation of object relatives into subject relatives and SVO sentences. At the age of 9, passive relatives begin to be used consistently. Different theories within the framework of generative grammar have been proposed to explain the results achieved in the tasks.