How children ‘add’ or ‘restrict’ entities and temporal spans in narrations: analysis of texts by Italian and English native children from 4 to 10 years old

The role of additive and restrictive means in textual cohesion has attired the attention of several scientists in the last 20 years, but essentially with respect to adults native speakers or adult learners of some Romance and Germanic languages. The role of these same items in the acquisition of a L1 by children is less studied, especially for Italian and English, namely the two languages on which I will focus in the present work. I will discuss the acquisition of additive and restrictive means in general, including crucially particles, together with the child’s progressing ability of building textual cohesion in a narrative text. The type of texts analysed are narrations collected by The Finite Story video clip by C. Dimroth (2006) (http://corpus1.mpi.nl/ds/imdi_browser?openpath=MPI560350#.). The informants are Italian and English native children of 4, 7 and 10 years and their narrations are compared to those of two adult (Italian and English native) reference groups. As far as the available studies make it possible, I compare my results to those concerning the acquisition of the means in question German, French and Polish children of the same age. As for research hypotheses, I will try to answer the following questions with respect: (a) at which age do additive and restrictive means appear? (b) which functions do additive and restrictive quantification strategies carry out in discourse organization of very young subjects? (c) What do the acquisitional paths of these forms in children tell us about the cognitive operations by children of the same age learning different languages? (d) which strategies, among these cognitive operations, are language-specific?