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While many theoretical proposals about the relationship between language and music processing have been proposed over the past 40 years, recent empirical advances have shed new light on this relationship. Many features are shared between language and music, inspiring research in the fields of linguistic theory, systematic musicology, and cognitive (neuro-)science. This research has led to many and diverse findings, making comparisons difficult. In the current review, we propose a framework within which to organise past research and conduct future research, suggesting that past research has assumed either domain-specificity or domain-generality for language and music. Domain-specific approaches theoretically and experimentally describe aspects of language and music processing assuming that there is shared (structure-building) processing. Domain-general approaches theoretically and experimentally describe how mechanisms such as cognitive control, attention or neural entrainment can explain language and music processing. Here we propose that combining elements from domain-specific and domain-general approaches can be beneficial for advances in theoretical and experimental work, as well as for diagnoses and interventions for atypical populations. We provide examples of past research which has implicitly merged domain-specific and domain-general assumptions, and suggest new experimental designs that can result from such a combination aiming to further our understanding of the human brain.

Well-established analyses of even claim that the contribution of this scalar-additive particle to the sentences in which it appears is of both an additive and a scalar inference [1], [2], [3]. Sentences with scalar-additive particles not only entail the corresponding sentences without the particle. They also imply that at least one among the associate’s [4] focus alternatives satisfies the predicate under consideration, and that the alternative(s) at issue are somewhat ordered [5]. When even appears under negation, this ordering gets reversed. As far as Italian is concerned, the perfect correspondent of even is held to be persino [6]. However, other particles can trigger the additive and scalar inferences in a similar way. Among these, pure and anche, and their negative counterparts neppure and neanche [7], [8], [9], [10]. At present, little experimental work has been carried out on Italian focus particles. To our knowledge, only one study has been conducted on the processing of persino [11]. Hence, it is yet to be determined whether the strength of the scalar inference may remain constant across different particles. We thus designed a multiple-choice cloze test targeting persino-persino...non, pure-neppure and anche-neanche. We first presented participants with a drawing and a short story and then asked them to fill in a concluding sentence choosing one of these six particles provided as alternatives (Figure 1). The pictures and stories were ideated to make participants build some expectations about which of the three characters presented was the most or least likely to carry out the action described – an action which could eventually be either successfully accomplished or failed by all. In this way, we aimed at observing whether the rate of particle selection may vary depending on which character the concluding sentence focusses on and, possibly, on the outcome of the stories. Via within-subject manipulation of Particle Polarity (positive-negative) and Focussed Ch

The present study used a visual world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate online processing of grammatical gender and number in Mandarin-Italian bilingual children, in comparison to monolingual Italian children. We examined how children anticipated upcoming nouns on the basis of grammatical gender and number information on the preceding article. While monolingual speakers are able to employ such predictive mechanisms from a very young age, to our knowledge, this is the first study that compares gender and number processing in bilingual children. The results show that, overall, participants made linguistic predictions on the basis of articles, although a post-hoc analysis focusing on a subset of our bilingual participants did not confirm the prediction effect in Mandarin-Italian bilingual children. We found a greater difference in the bilingual group than in the monolingual group, in that bilinguals tended to be slower when processing gender than number. Finally, we found that L2 proficiency had a significant effect on gender processing in the bilingual group. One interpretation of these findings is that the discrepancy between gender and number may be due to transfer, since Mandarin does not have grammatical gender while it does have a conceptual notion of number. Another factor may be L2 proficiency, and especially lexical knowledge, since gender is an arbitrary property stored in the lexicon, while number is concretely linked to the referential context.

The acquisition of languages by children using two languages is a matter of debate as many factors contribute to the success of this type of acquisition. We focus on how the competence of dual-language children changes in their two languages as a function of length of exposure and establish whether there are reciprocal influences during language development. We examined the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in a group of 6-year-old (younger) and 8-year-old (older) Mandarin–Italian dual-language children. After 3 years of regular and intensive exposure to Italian, the younger group reached the same level of competence in the comprehension of relative clauses in their two languages, and after 5 years of exposure to Italian, the older group had a better comprehension of relative clauses in Italian than in Mandarin. Acquiring two languages leads to bidirectional influence, beyond a reciprocal support. Finally, some penalty may be observed in the acquisition of subject head-final relative clauses, which is not evident in that of subject head-initial relative clauses.

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response study, we show that null and overt pronouns are processed differently. Specifically, null pronouns are found to be less costly to process than overt pronouns. We argue that this difference is caused by an additional reasoning step that is needed to process marked overt pronouns but not unmarked null pronouns. A comparison with data from Dutch, a language with overt but no null pronouns, demonstrates that Italian pronouns are processed differently from Dutch pronouns. These findings suggest that the processing of a marked form is influenced by alternative forms within the same language, making its processing costly.

We aim at determining whether 7-year-old Italian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI): (1) have problems with the production of wh- questions; (2) display a subject/object asymmetry in producing which- and who questions; (3) attempt to simplify questions, especially which- questions; (4) have difficulties with movement and verbal agreement in wh- questions. We elicited subject and object who and which NP questions in 10 children with SLI (M = 7;2), in 10 chronological age (CA)-matched controls (M = 7;2) and 10 language-matched controls (M = 5;2). Results showed that (1) children with SLI produced fewer questions than both control groups; (2) a subject/object asymmetry was observed in who questions but not in which NP questions; (3) which NP questions were more problematic than who questions; (4) children with SLI produced more agreement errors and resorted to simplification strategies to avoid wh- question production. Results point to a grammatical deficit due to the computation of complex grammatical relations and suggest that there is a misalignment among pieces of linguistic competence needed to form Italian wh- questions (wh- movement and agreement computation). Outcomes have implications for clinical assessment recommending the production of wh- questions to be considered in the evaluation of SLI in Italian

The performance of 122 children on syntactic awareness of clitics and articles in French was examined. Three clinical groups (21 children with ASD, 22 children with SLI, 23 children with DD) and a group of 56 younger children with TD were studied. On the article task, children with ASD obtained lower scores than all the other groups and on the clitic task they performed worse than children with DD. In addition, children with ASD and low expressive language displayed more difficulty than children with SLI on the clitic task. Thus, a subgroup of children with ASD is taxed in an area that is critical to identify children with SLI

Analytical causatives, in Romance languages, are of two types, one called faire‐infinitif and the other faire‐par. They are similar in that they comprise a finite verb, the causative verb, selecting an infinitive complement, and they share properties with monoclausal structures. They differ in their structure and in their meaning. After having surveyed the properties of causatives and having established their structure, the chapter presents two analyses of analytical causatives. According to one, causative sentences feature incorporation of the infinitive with the causative verb, giving rise to a monoclausal structure (following a long tradition in the linguistic field). The second analysis holds that there are two causative verbs, a functional and a full‐fledged lexical verb. Under the incorporation analysis, the existence of two causative constructions is explained by assuming that the causative verb is associated with two thematic grids: one grid includes a causer/agent, an event, and a benefactive role (faire‐infinitif), and the other grid only includes a causer/agent and an event role (faire‐par). The causative complement associated with the former grid is a vP including the external argument (of the infinitive), which receives two thematic roles (one from the infinitive and one from the causative verb); the one associated with the latter grid is a VP, lacking the external argument. Lack of the external argument and thus formation of the faire‐par construction are possible only if the process described by the infinitive affects the internal argument of the infinitive. The second analysis accounts for the existence of the two causative constructions by assuming that the lexical verb is a v do , which selects a nominal VP complement and gives rise to the faire‐par construction. Since the complement is a nominal VP, no external argument is projected, as happens with nominals, and a PP can be right‐adjoined to express the causee. The functional verb is a v cause

Two omission phenomena in a variety of child languages are discussed: omission of articles and third person direct object clitic pronouns. I show that omission is not a unitary phenomenon across child languages. Omission of articles is observed in production from age 2;0 through about age 3;0, in spite of the fact that around 11 months infants are sensitive to them. Omission is higher and lasts longer in Germanic languages than in Romance languages. This pattern is accounted for by assuming that children know the syntax governing the use of nouns, but fail to comply with various interface requirements. As for 3rd person direct object clitics, omission is shown to last longer in some languages (Spanish, Romanian and Greek) than in others (Italian, Catalan and French). This different pattern depends on the nature of clitics in the two sets of languages, clausal affixes versus DP/D°, and the different processes in which they are involved. This approach accounts for the syntactic differences between the two sets of languages: clitic doubling, past participle agreement and absence/presence of the partitive clitic.

This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”), thus establishing a robust cross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for 5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results, indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to select a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as well as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production of pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who at age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for language impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a developmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain cross-linguistic differences discussed in the article.

In this chapter, we review some works on the acquisition of adjectives and present novel experimental data on their interpretation. We interpret these data as suggesting that younger children start by interpreting relative gradable adjectives (GAs henceforth) like tall in a categorical way, i.e., as referring to sets of objects, and only at a later stage they switch to the comparative-like interpretation. We propose that this evolutionary trend can be easily explained within a semantic framework that assumes that relative GAs denote a partial function from individuals to truth-values. We further suggest a parallelism with the phenomenon of scalar implicature computation in children, a phenomenon that has been studied extensively by Gennaro Chierchia, whose valuable contribution extends from semantic theory (Chierchia 2006; Chierchia et al. 2012) to experimental investigation (Chierchia et al. 1998; Chierchia et al. 2001; Chierchia et al. 2004; Foppolo et al. 2012; Panizza et al. 2009). This chapter is organized as follows: after introducing the well-known distinction between intersective and relative adjectives (Section 1.1), we review the major findings in the literature on the acquisition of adjectives (Section 1.2); we then summarize the two major theoretical approaches that have been put forth to analyze the meaning of relative GAs, i.e., the degree-based analysis and the partial function account (Section 1.3). In Section 2, we present the experimental data of two studies and, in the final section, we discuss these results within the partial function approach.

Il lavoro offreun'introduzione alle moderne teorie di processamento sintattico discutendole alla luce di dati di acquisizione del linguaggio