Acquisizione del linguaggio e complessità sintattica. Il caso delle frasi relative nei bambini

Abstract

This paper focuses on the comprehension of relative clauses by typically-developing children, and more specifically, reviews the well-known asymmetry between subject relative clauses (SRc) and object relative clauses (ORc). This asymmetry, which consists in a greater difficulty that children display with ORc, has shaped different models of relative clauses acquisition, some of which will be examined here and broadly divided into two major categories, according to their preference for underdeveloped syntactic abilities in children or to the emphasis on processing factors. Moving from the observation that not all ORc are difficult in the same way, I will also consider the role of linguistic features in children comprehension and present some experiments that have investigated how the manipulation of the type of ORc influences children’s performance. In Italian, e.g., a finer difference in the time of acquisition of ORc has emerged between ORc with preverbal subject and ORc with postverbal subject. Moreover, some recent findings in Hebrew have shown a gradient of difficulty also in ORc with preverbal subject, which is higher when both the head of the relative and the embedded subject share the lexical restriction feature. These experiments have motivated an approach which adopts the syntactic principle of locality, known as Relativized Minimality (RIZZI 1990), as a metric of syntactic complexity to explain the acquisitional data.