Timing of Adverb Production in Italian Children’s Early Speech

This paper investigates the acquisition of Italian adverbs looking at children’s early spontaneous speech. The aims were twofold: (i) to determine the timing in which different adverbial items emerged in Italian children’s early speech; (ii) to reveal how the architecture of adverbial projections develops during acquisition. Two studies were carried out: Study 1 investigated the adverbs provided in the Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI) and from Wordbank; Study 2 analyzed the spontaneous speech data of 17 Italian children collected through the CHILDES database, providing analyses by wMLU and considering the adverbs in Cinque (1999). Our results showed that children start producing temporal, place and quantity adverbs before 18 months, with a mean acquisition attested around 24 months, in line with other works (see Pačesová, 1968; Hanhong and Fang, 2011). In addition, we found that the adverbial hierarchy individuated in theoretical works (Cinque, 1999) is unraveled from the bottom to the top during acquisition, as expected under the Growing Trees Approach (Friedmann, Belletti and Rizzi, 2021).