Adjective Learning in English and Italian Children: A comparison.

The acquisition of adjectives in two Italian and two English children is compared searching for differences and similarities in their acquisition paths towards adult competence. The question addressed is whether there is a correspondence between the children’s output and parental input both in terms of frequency of use and of the semantic relationship that adjectives express. The second question at issue is whether there are some (expected) differences between English and Italian children with respect to the adjectival production that could be related to differences in the two languages. More specifically, since in Italian the post-nominal position of adjectives is more salient than the English pre-nominal position, this might have consequences on the period of their emergence and development in child speech. Moreover, the fact that Italian has overt adjectival morphological markers, although shared with nouns and therefore non-salient per se, may favour a selective attention on the adjectives as object properties. Namely, homogeneous morphological units might facilitate the children in relating the adjective to the noun (provided the noun is already familiar to the children).