Postverbal Subjects in Child Italian: Argument structure, discourse, and the definiteness effect.

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 children (6;1 - 7;4). For this, we employed an elicitation task and a forced-choice task. Results indicated that the children use postverbal subjects at the VP-periphery felicitously, although they do not perform at ceiling. Unexpectedly, results also suggested possible remnant difficulty with the definiteness effect. However, after comparison with adult data we argue this is not a developmental issue and instead may suggest our children were aware that the definiteness effect is not about definiteness per se.