What a thousand children tell us about grammatical complexity and working memory: A cross-sectional analysis on the comprehension of clitics and passives in Italian
Ikusi/ Ireki
Data
2023Egilea
Moscati, Vincenzo
Marini, Andrea
Biondo, Nicoletta
Moscati V, Marini A, Biondo N. What a thousand children tell us about grammatical complexity and working memory: A cross-sectional analysis on the comprehension of clitics and passives in Italian. Applied Psycholinguistics. 2023;44(6):1161-1184. doi:10.1017/S0142716423000462
Applied Psycholinguistics
Applied Psycholinguistics
Laburpena
Data from 996 Italian-speaking children were collected and analyzed to assess whether a movement-based notion of grammatical complexity is adequate to capture the developmental trend of clitics and passives in Italian. A second goal of the study was to address the relationship between working memory and syntactic development, exploring the hypothesis that higher digit span values predict better comprehension of complex matrix sentences. The results confirm the validity of a ranking of grammatical structures based on constituent movement, with both clitics and passives developing in parallel and later than canonical SVO sentences. Working memory also shows an effect on sentence comprehension in general, but standard measures (digit span forward/backward) do not show a selective advantage in handling complex constructions such as clitics and passives.