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This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics ("pronoun languages") with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context ("clitic languages"), thus establishing a robust cross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for 5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results, indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to select a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as well as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production of pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who at age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for language impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a developmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain crosslinguistic differences discussed in the article. ARTICLE HISTORY

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Previous studies have established a correlation beween early clitic omission and the existence of past participle agreement, explainable with a maturational constraint -the UCC. Since Portuguese doesn't show past participle agreement, it is expected that portuguese children will produce clitics early on. I order to find out whether this correlation holds for Portuguese, an experimental study was conducted reproducing Schaeffer's 1997 and adapting it to particular properties of Portuguese -the availability of null objects and variability of clitic position. The results of this study suggest that Portuguese children do omit clitics, apparently contradicting previous studies. Since clitic omission lasts until later than in other languages, we hypothesize that the explanation may rely on complexity factors.

In this paper, we argue that clitic omission in European Portuguese speaking children cannot be due to a late acquisition of pragmatics. Based on experimental data from an elicited production task and a truth-value judgement task, we show that children acquiring European Portuguese as a first language know the appropriate pragmatic conditions for producing clitics and null objects and interpret clitics and null objects in the appropriate pragmatic context. However, their knowledge of some syntactic constraints on null objects, which are grammatical only in certain contexts in the adult grammar, is not fully mastered yet. The results obtained provide additional evidence in support of the idea that some aspects of pragmatics are acquired early and that some aspects of syntactic knowledge are acquired late.

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Grillo and Costa (2014) claim that Relative-Clause attachment ambiguity resolution is largely dependent on whether or not a Pseudo-Relative interpretation is available. Data from Italian, and other languages allowing Pseudo-Relatives, support this hypothesis. Pseudo-Relative availability, however, covaries with the semantics of the main predicate (e.g., perceptual vs. stative). Experiment 1 assesses whether this predicate distinction alone can account for prior attachment results by testing it with a language that disallows Pseudo-Relatives (i.e. English). Low Attachment was found independent of Predicate-Type. Predicate-Type did however have a minor modulatory role. Experiment 2 shows that English, traditionally classified as a Low Attachment language, can demonstrate High Attachment with sentences globally ambiguous between a Small-Clause and a reduced Relative-Clause interpretation. These results support a grammatical account of previous effects and provide novel evidence for the parser's preference of a Small-Clause over a Restrictive interpretation, crosslinguistically.

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