Morphosyntactic development in Italian and its relevance to parameter-setting models: comments on the paper by Pizzuto & Caselli.
Pizzuto & Caselli (1992) claim that data from the morphosyntactic development of Italian-speaking children are inconsistent with nativist, parameter-setting models of language development. In the present Note it is argued that much of the data which Pizzuto & Caselli adduce is irrelevant to the specific hypotheses they are evaluating and that those data which are relevant fully support parameter-setting and linguistic-theoretic models, contrary to their claims.
Hyams
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University of California, Linguistics Department, Los Angeles 90024.
D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior