“The relation between input and output in L1 acquisition: the case of italian adverbs”

This study investigates the relation between adults and children in first language acquisition (L1), focusing on the acquisition of Italian adverbs. The research has two main objectives: (1) to analyse the syntactic types of adverbs and their frequency in child-directed adult speech, and to (2) explore the role of adult input in children’s production of adverbs, particularly regarding the timing of emergence and syntactic typology of adverbs. We examined the occurrences of a subset of italian adverbs in five italian corpora of child-directed adult speech from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000). The analysis is based on 155 documents that include spontaneous interactions between adult caregivers and 17 Italian children, aged 16 to 40 months. The research was conducted by using the CLAN software. Once all the occurrences of these lexical items were identified, each adverb was collected in macro-categories related to syntax, following Cinque’s hierarchy (1999). To better examine all the target productions and to highlight crucial details for our research purposes, data was classified according to the adult speaker, the child’s age, the sentence and the corpus in which adverbs occur. Our study provides insights into the adverbial acquisition domain and contributes to better understanding the role of adult input in the acquisition of adverbs and the broader process of first language (L1) acquisition in young learners.