Young Children’s Subject Inclusion in Italian: An Analysis of Corpus and Experimental Data

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the production of subjects of young Italian monolingual children. Italian is a null-subject language (i.e., overt subjects are optional), therefore young children acquiring Italian are exposed to utterances containing overt subjects less often than children who acquire a non-null subject language (e.g., English). This thesis presents data from an elicited-imitation experiment (Study 1), and a corpus analysis of children’s spontaneous speech (Study 2). In Study 1, seventeen Italian monolingual children (age range = 2;2 to 3;4; Mean Length of Utterance in Words range = 1.9 to 3.4) were observed through an elicited-imitation task. Children were asked to repeat 30 sentences which varied in length and subject type (i.e., lexical, pronominal). Preliminary analyses measured the inclusion of major constituents in children’s repetitions, with a focus on subject inclusion. Study 2 examines subject inclusion in Italian children’s spontaneous speech. The corpus is composed of 154 transcripts retrieved from the CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) Italian database.