Italian children's use of verb and noun morphology during the preschool years *

Five groups of Italian-speaking children ages 2 to 7 years participated in tasks designed to assess their use of a range of grammatical morphemes. Present tense verb inflections and noun plural inflections reached ceiling levels by 4 years of age, whereas present tense copula forms and definite singular articles showed high accuracy levels by 5 years of age. Errors on present tense inflections were rarely infinitives. Instead, most errors could be characterized as ‘near misses’ – productions of forms that differed from the target by a single feature of person or number. Many of these one-feature errors were directional; first person forms were more likely to be replaced by third person forms than the reverse, and plural forms were more likely to be substituted by singular forms than the opposite pattern. Errors of this type are not handled by models of grammatical development that deal with broader constructs such as the availability or optionality of tense or finiteness.