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The acquisition of Italian morphology: a reply to Hyams

In Pizzuto & Caselli (1992, hereafter: P&C) we provided an overview of morphological development in Italian, focusing on three aspects of free speech production (verbs, pronouns and articles), in the longitudinal records of three children. We analysed our data using criteria appropriate to allow reliable cross-linguistic comparisons with data from English. By this means we evaluated the plausibility of a nativist, parameter-setting account of language development in Italian and English, as proposed for these two languages by Hyams (1986a b; 1987; 1988). We concluded that our data did not support the strong predictions made within such a parameter-setting account, and that the developmental patterns observed were best explained by a combination of cognitive, perceptual and distributional factors of the sort that are proposed in most other models of language acquisition.