This study examines the role of previously known language in L3 Brazilian Portuguese (BP) object expression acquisition. It investigates the claims of the main models of L3 transfer, the cumulative enhancement model (CEM) (Flynn et al. 2004), the L2...
Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have a psycholinguistic profile evincing multiple syntactic processing impairments. Spanish-speaking children with DLD struggle with gender agreement on clitics; however, the existing evidence comes...
This work describes a case of object clitic reduplication (OCR) in restructuring sentences, in a Central Italian dialect: Perugino. OCR (not attested in the local variety of Italian spoken in Perugia) is optional and alternates with either enclisis o...
The present study compared two sentence–picture-matching tests in Greek, namely the Syntactic Proficiency Test and the sentence comprehension subtest of the Diagnostic Verbal Intelligence Quotient (DVIQ) battery, to assess complex sentence comp...
This contribution addresses a set of phenomena attested in the dialects spoken in Piedmont, including Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties, and in West Liguria, concerning the interaction between subject and object clitics. Complementarily t...
The main goal of this article is to examine in detail an area of the grammar where standard Romanian, a Balkan Sprachbund language of the Romance phylum, and the Romance dialects of Southern Italy (here we used the dialect of Ragusa, in South-East Si...
The role native language transfer plays in L2 acquisition raises the question of whether L1 constitutes a permanent representational deficit to mastery of the L2 morphosyntax and prosody or if it can eventually be overcome. Earlier research has shown...
This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages...
The study offers novel evidence on the grammar and processing of clitic placement in heritage languages. Building on earlier findings of divergent clitic placement in heritage European Portuguese and Serbian, this study extends this line of inquiry t...
Clitic doubling (CD) is the co-appearance in the same sentence of the clitic and a correlative syntagma in the canonical position of the object. Apart from obligatory contexts, CD of the indirect object (IO) is found with variable frequency in Romanc...
It has been widely argued that morphological competence, particularly functional morphology, represents the bottleneck of second language acquisition (Jensen et al. 2017; Lardiere 1998, 2005; Slabakova 2008, 2009, 2013). In this study, we explore thr...
The present study explores two morphological differences in direct object expression between Spanish and Catalan: Differential Object Marking (DOM), and the accusative clitics el /l/ vs. ho /u/. Both phenomena are regulated by semantic features, such...
The acquisition of clitics still remains a highly controversial issue in Greek acquisition literature despite the bulk of studies performed. Object clitics have been shown to be early acquired by monolingual children in terms of production rates, whe...
The aim of this work is to investigate how bilingual children perform with respect to monolingual children in a task eliciting direct object clitic pronouns in Italian. Clitic production is considered a good clinical marker for Italian monolingual ch...
Bantu languages represent a typical example of how morphology and syntax are deeply intertwined. Indeed, these agglutinative languages employ affixes, hence morphemes, to express relations that in other languages—like Italian or English—a...
This paper deals with the distribution of the use of the accusative as an indirect object in two major dialect groups of Modern Greek, namely Northern Greek and Pontic Greek. The loss of the dative in Medieval Greek (c. 10th c. AD) resulted in the us...
Dynamic Assessment (DA) is recommended for testing bilinguals as it tests the child’s learning potential and not her or his previously acquired language knowledge. Thus, it allows language difficulties to be distinguished from difficulties rela...
Yucatec Spanish displays a type of sentence that appears to mix elements of an active impersonal and a passive. For example, “te castigaron por mi tío” may be interpreted as “you were punished by my uncle”, where a by-p...