Thedevelopmentofsentence Comprehension In Italian And Serbocroatian: Local Versus Distributed Cues

This chapter is based on crosslinguistic studies of the ordinal question, concentrating on two richly inflected languages, Italian and Serbo-Croatian. It focuses on the use of morphological agreement in sentence comprehension in an attempt to account for some puzzling disparities in timing that are germane to the two interval questions: why are some aspects of grammatical comprehension relatively late to develop, and when are we justified in concluding that those forms are "really there"? The chapter demonstrates that local cues are acquired before global cues in a language that makes extensive use of both forms of morphology. The chapter shows that Serbo-Croatian children make extensive use of case information as a cue to sentence meaning by 3 years of age, although they do not reach adult levels until age 5. The first systematic use of a linguistic form has no privileged status. Keywords: crosslinguistic studies; global cues; Italian; linguistic form; morphological agreement; sentence comprehension; Serob-Croatian