"This volume presents eleven papers on the acquisition of Romance, most of them presented at the Romance Turn VIII, held in Bellaterra in September, 2016. The first part of the volume is devoted to passives and related constructions: subject- and object-experiencer predicates. The results unveil domains in comprehension in which children are adult-like, while in other domains there is delay - it is a challenge for current theoretical proposals to encompass all of these results. The second part of the volume focuses on the TP-field: clitics and negation. The third part deals with the CP-field, with topics such as backward anaphora, subjects and the left periphery, and recursiveness. The volume includes studies carried out on a variety of populations: typically developing children, bilinguals, children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Specific Language Impairment, and heritage speakers, with a view to a general theory of language acquisition"--.

• On the Acquisition of the Syntax of Romance
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Part I. The acquisition of subjects: Passives, experiencers and other constructions
• French experiencer verbs and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Prior research
    • 2.1 The Universal Freezing Hypothesis and the acquisition of be-passives
    • 2.2 The UFH and the acquisition of get-passives
    • 2.3 Guasti’s conjecture for Romance causatives
    • 2.4 Acquisition of French causatives
    • 2.5 Romance causatives and the UFH
    • 2.6 The locus of maturational change
  • 3. Experiencer verbs and smuggling
    • 3.1 The UFH and the acquisition of French experiencer verbs
    • 3.2 Results
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
• Discrimination of passive predicates by Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. On the structure of adjectival passive sentences and its relation to eventive passives
  • 3. Previous results in favor of an adjectival interpretation of verbal passives
  • 4. Experimental study
    • Method
    • Results
    • Discussion
  • 5. A procedural account of the acquisition of passives
  • 6. Final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• The acquisition of Spanish passives: The comparison between subject experiencer versus actional verbs and direct aspectual semantic evidence for the adjectival interpretation
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Some history
  • 3. Spanish passives
  • 4. Experiment 1: Actional vs. psychological passives
    • 4.1 Method
    • 4.2 Results
    • 4.3. Discussion
  • 5. Experiment 2: Adjectival vs. verbal passives
    • 5.1 Method
    • 5.2 Results
    • 5.3 Discussion
  • 6. General discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • A. Sample pictures
• Favorable processing conditions in the production of passive sentences by Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Portuguese verbal passives and the production of passives by Portuguese-speaking children
  • 3. Computing verbal passives in a psycholinguistic perspective
    • 3.1 Syntactic priming
    • 3.2 Discourse continuity
  • 4. The experimental study
    • 4.1 First task
    • 4.2 A second task
  • 5. General discussion
  • 6. Final remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
• Part II. The TP field: Clitics and Negation
• Clitic omission in bilingual Portuguese-Spanish acquisition
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Clitics and null objects in Portuguese and Spanish
  • 3. Bilingual acquisition and clitic omission
  • 4. Experimental design
    • 4.1 Research questions and hypotheses
    • 4.2 Participants
    • 4.3 Task and procedure
    • 4.4 Coding
  • 5. Results
  • 6. Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
• Syntactic awareness of clitic pronouns and articles in French-speaking children with autism, specific language impairment and developmental dyslexia
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Morphosyntax in children with ASD and children with DD
    • 2.1 Morphosyntax in children with ASD
    • 2.2 Morphosyntax in children with DD
  • 3. Our study
    • 3.1 Participants
    • 3.2 Experimental procedure and materials
    • 3.3 Results
  • 4. Discussion
  • References
• The comprehension of Italian negation in Mandarin-Italian sequential bilingual children
  • 1. Introduction
    • Previous studies on children’s acquisition of negation
    • The two-step simulation hypothesis
  • 2. Method
    • Participants
    • Materials and procedure
    • Data analysis
  • 3. Results
    • The analysis of response accuracy
    • The analysis of response latency
  • 4. Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Part III. The CP field and recursion
• Acquisition of backward anaphora in European Portuguese by Chinese learners
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Review of previous studies
    • 2.1 Previous studies on forward anaphora
    • 2.2 The properties of backward anaphora
    • 2.3 The processing of backward anaphora
  • 3. The objectives of the study
  • 4. The experimental study
    • 4.1 Methods
    • 4.2 The results of the experiment
    • 4.3 Discussion
  • 5. Conclusions
  • References
  • Appendix
• Sentence repetition and language impairment in French-speaking children with ASD
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Background and aims: The role of sentence repetition in evaluating formal language impairment
  • 3. Methods
    • 3.1 Participants
    • 3.2 Materials and procedure
  • 4. Results
    • 4.1 The repetition task
    • 4.2 The impact of linguistic and extra-linguistic measures in the ASD group
  • 5. Discussion
    • The impact of extra-linguistic factors in the ASD group
  • 6. Limitations and future directions for research
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
  • A. Appendix
• On the comprehension of recursive nominal modifiers in child Romanian
  • 1. Aim
  • 2. Direct and indirect recursion
  • 3. Recursion in language acquisition
  • 4. Properties of Romanian recursive PP and RC noun modifiers
  • 5. The study
    • 5.1 Main questions
    • 5.2 Method and participants
    • 5.3 Results
    • 5.4 Discussion
  • 6. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgment
  • References
• Name index
• Subject index
• Language index