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In:L1 Acquisition and L2 Learning: The view from Romance
Edited by Larisa Avram, Anca Sevcenco and Veronica Tomescu
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 65] 2021
► pp. 13–38

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Chapter 1
Acquisition of clitic climbing by European Portuguese children

 | CLUNL/NOVA-FCSH
 | CLUNL/NOVA-FCSH
Published online: 17 November 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.65.01lob
Abstract
This study investigates the acquisition of clitic climbing by European Portuguese speaking children considering spontaneous production data from three children aged 1;5 to 3;11 (Santos’ corpus: Santos et al., 2014) and data from an elicited production task administered to 64 children aged 5;2 to 8;2. The study shows that: clitic climbing is acquired early, as expected for a parametric property that is dependent on the specification of the functional domain; there is early sensitivity to properties of the adult grammar, although children take a while to determine which specific verbs allow or disallow clitic climbing. In optional contexts younger children prefer clitic climbing constructions over non-climbing constructions. We discuss these results in light of the notion of complexity in language development.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Clitic climbing and clitic placement in European Portuguese
    • 2.2Clitic climbing and crosslinguistic variation
    • 2.3Clitic climbing and intralinguistic variation
    • 2.4Clitic climbing, restructuring and syntactic complexity
    • 2.5The acquisition of clitic placement
    • 2.6Research questions
  • 3.Spontaneous production data
    • 3.1Method
    • 3.2Results
  • 4.Elicited production study
    • 4.1Methods
    • 4.2Results
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (44)
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