While previous work on postverbal subjects in Italian has shown that young children are sensitive to the effects of argument structure and definiteness, little is known about the acquisition of postverbal subjects at the VP-periphery. In response, the present study investigated such subjects under new-information focus by monolingual Italian…

Previous studies show that infants store functional morphemes for inferring syntactic categories of adjacent words, and they generally perform better with nouns than with verbs. In this study, we tested whether toddlers can exploit phrasal groupings for syntactic categorization in the face of noisy co-occurrence patterns. Using a visual fixation…

When toddlers hear a novel word, they quickly and independently link it with a novel object rather than known-name objects. However, they are less proficient in retaining multiple novel words. Sleep and even short naps can enhance declarative memory in adults and children and this study investigates the effect of napping on children's memory for…