The acquisition of lexical and functional categories in English and German learners of Italian as a Foreign Language

The study of morphosyntactic development in children has a long tradition in both first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition theories and literatures. In particular, «researchers of child language acquisition have long noted that children pass through developmental stages of grammatical morphology with [...] variable or optional production rates of morphosyntactic inflection» due to incomplete inflectional representations of features. In spite of the large number of studies on these issues, specific cross-linguistic research which could shed new light on internal and/or external factors governing early acquisition of the inflectional system is still very limited. Following recent research carried out by Galasso on the acquisition of inflection, the present paper aims to test the assumption that child language morphosyntactic development is determined by an emerging internal computational system we assume as characteristic of L1 as well as L2 acquisition.