AdvP: The emergence and distribution of Adverbs in Italian children

The present work aims at investigating the emergence and the syntactic distribution of adverbs in spontaneous productions of Italian children. The main goal is to contribute to better understanding the acquisition of adverbs and the structure of the syntactic skeleton in the domain of Language Acquisition. This is not a settled debate in current literature and this work presents the first thorough study considering the development of adverbs for Italian children. We focus on two established hypotheses. The leading hypothesis is the Adverbs Hierarchy proposed by Cinque (1999), which states a fixed order of the adverbs in the clause, being the adverbs the overt manifestation of unique specifiers of distinct maximal projections (rather than adjuncts). Under this cartographic and generative perspective, the order is universal among languages and would be also available in children production. The other hypothesis taken into account is the Growing Trees approach proposed by Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi (2021), which states that the acquisition of syntax follows the cartographic projections of the tree. But it is also a maturational hypothesis, since under this view the lower parts of the tree should be acquired first, and higher parts later. In particular, lower age should correspond with the production of adverbs sitting in the lower portion of the hierarchy, age increase should instead reflect a gradual ascent in the production of the adverbial hierarchy. We analyzed the natural speech of 18 Italian speaking children aged ranged 16-40 months, adapted from CHILDES Corpus (MacWhinney, 2000).