Production and comprehension of rhetorical questions in the acquisition of Italian as a first language

This paper investigates the acquisition of rhetorical questions (RhQs) inmonolingual children acquiring Italian, comparing the comprehension andproduction of RhQs based on their optional lexical, morphosyntactic, andprosodic cues. We show that 6-to-9-year-old children are in the process ofacquiring the use of optional lexical and morphosyntactic markers in produc-tion (e.g. discourse particles, information structure), but only 9-year-oldsshow adult-like patterns. In comprehension, children from age 7 were ableto consistently recognize RhQs through a combination of prosodic andlexico-syntactic cues, but only some children were able to do so based onprosody alone. Furthermore, the production frequency of lexico-syntacticmarkers correlated with accuracy in the comprehension task when a lexico-syntactic marker was involved. Our results suggest that the acquisition ofRhQs and their pragmatic marking is still ongoing throughout the primaryschool years, in line with other phenomena at the interface between di er-ent modules of language, pragmatics, and communicative competence.