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Description:
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This volume presents sixteen new articles on the acquisition of Romance
languages by both well-established researchers and vital new contributors to the
field. Under a generative umbrella, the articles in this collection investigate the
acquisition of French, Romanian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Portuguese
across different contexts including first language acquisition, bilingual
acquisition, specifically impaired first language acquisition, child L2 acquisition,
second language acquisition, as well as first language attrition. This volume
advances our understanding of how languages are acquired and how the study
of Romance languages contributes to clarifying challenging open questions on
the acquisition of key functional categories and other related phenomena. In
particular, the articles included assess complexity as a relevant factor shaping
children’s acquisition of syntactic and phonological structures, they refine
crucial theoretical constructs such as parameter setting and language transfer,
and propose language change as another crucial factor affecting the process of
language acquisition and attrition.
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