Object relatives with postverbal subject in Italian-speaking children and adults: The role of encyclopedic knowledge in detecting sentence ambiguity

ABSTRACT

Italian relative clauses like Il bambino che bacia la mamma ‘the child that kisses the mom’ are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic (im)plausibility in processing these ambiguous constructions. Italian children’s (7;01–10;00 years old) and adults’ (21;08–31;02 y.o.) comprehension is tested through a picture selection task. The test sentences contain lexical verbs whose interpretation can be modulated by encyclopedic knowledge (e.g., to spoon-feed). In the ambiguous sentence Il bambino che imbocca la mamma ‘the child that spoon-feeds the mom,’ the object reading is more plausible: Moms rather than children are expected agents of the spoon-feeding. Nonetheless, word order and morphosyntactic and prosodic cues prompt the subject interpretation. Results indicate that semantic plausibility cues alone are not robust enough to discard the subject reading. However, adults are sensitive to these cues, which can modulate their comprehension of ambiguous relatives. Conversely, children are unable to exploit encyclopedic knowledge in sentence processing. This can be explained with children’s reluctance to integrate contextual and encyclopedic semantic cues during processing, and with their limited processing resources, which could constrain their capacity of sentence reanalysis.

Notes

¹ The DP in capital letters indicates where the primary stress is placed in the declarative sentence.

² Contrasting evidence has been reported by Arosio, Adani & Guasti (2009), who found that, despite the manipulation of number features, Italian children did not display an adult-like performance in the comprehension of object relatives with postverbal subject until 11 years of age.

³ An anonymous reviewer pointed out that an experimental condition that fully disambiguates toward an object reading semantically as in the sentence Mostrami il bambino che morde il cane (lit. ‘Show me the boy that bites the dog’) would have provided a clearer picture of how semantic manipulation can affect sentence comprehension. We agree that including this condition would have been useful and that its absence constitutes a limitation of the experimental design, which can be addressed by future research. This condition was not included because we adopted the experimental design of previous studies on RCs in which both participants were always either human beings (children vs. adults) or animals (Friedmann & Novogrodsky 2004, Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi 2009, Utzeri 2007, Adani et al. 2010, Adani 2011). Furthermore, we did not include sentences such as (16) on the basis of two main findings reported by previous literature, which led us to assume that the object reading of such RC is accessible to both the child and the adult parser. First, there is compelling evidence showing that animacy dissimilarity enhances the comprehension of object RCs for both adults and children (Goodluck & Tavakolian 1982; Gennari & MacDonald 2009, Traxler, Morris & Seely 2002; Arosio, Adani & Guasti 2009); second, studies on Child Italian have shown that the parser succeeds in the computation of object RCs with postverbal subjects both in comprehension and in production (Adani et al. 2010, Volpato 2010, Adani 2011, Utzeri 2007, Guasti & Cardinaletti 2003, Belletti & Contemori 2010, see section “Italian Object Relatives”).

⁴ In addition to passivization, young children resort also to causative constructions (si fa + INF verb) as in (a) or to the receive + DP construction (b).

(a) La bambina che si fa pettinare dalla mamma ‘The girl who gets combed by the mom’

(b) La bambina che riceve un bacio dalla mamma ‘The girl that receives a kiss by the mom’

(adapted from Belletti & Chesi 2011). However, as soon as children master the passive construction (at around age 5), this become the preferred strategy to avoid the production of object RCs.