The timing of production: on the acquisition of Italian prepositions

This paper investigates the acquisition of Italian prepositions looking at children’s early spontaneous speech. With a longitudinal study on the production of fifteen Italian-speaking children aged 1;4 to 3;4, we sought to determine the timing in which different prepositional items emerged in children’s speech. Following much acquisition research, the order of emergence is assumed to reveal how syntax develops during acquisition (Rizzi, 1993/1994; Pérez-Leroux & al., 2012; Friedmann, Belletti, & Rizzi, 2020). Our analysis shows that children produced different prepositional items at different stages following the geometry of the syntactic tree proposed in the cartographic literature (Svenonius, 2008, 2010): KP prepositions are acquired before pP prepositions which in turn appear earlier than AxPartP prepositions. Our results are in line with the previous findings on French and Spanish(Morgenstern & Sekali, 2009; Stewart, 2015) but diverge from those reported for English (Littlefield, 2009). In this respect, the development of prepositions matches the acquisition of other functional morphemes that differentiates morphologically rich languages from those with a poorer functional inventory.