The production of subject and object relative clauses in Italian-speaking children: a syntactic priming study

For children, Object Relative (OR) clauses can be late acquired across a number of languages (e.g., this is the goat that the cows are pushing), and production of non-standard ORs that include resumption is often attested (e.g., Italian; French; English). In addition, starting at age 6, children start adopting passive subject relatives (SRs) (e.g., this is the goat that is being pushed by the cows) when an OR is expected. In the present study, we designed an elicitation task to explore the effects of syntactic priming on the production of ORs and passive SRs in Italian-speaking children aged 4;4–6;0. The syntactic priming experiment took place in two sessions, 1 week apart, to explore immediate and cumulative effects of priming. The results revealed significant effects of immediate and cumulative priming, with a significant increase in the production of passive SRs and ORs with a gap in session 2 compared to session 1, in line with implicit learning accounts of syntactic priming. In addition, the results show that exposure to ORs with a gap can decrease the production of ORs with resumption in younger children (52–64 months). The results are discussed in relation to implicit learning accounts of syntactic priming, experience-based and capacity theories of processing.