The acquisition of syntactic structures in heritage Italian: Assessing the role of language exposure at critical periods

The present study aims to show that language exposure at certain age ranges is crucial for the successful acquisition of certain syntactic structures, such as complement clauses, adverbial clauses, clauses involving movement and clauses involving both movement and embedding. Twenty-nine Italian heritage children living in Germany and ranging in age between 7;08 and 12;06 took part in the study. We assessed their acquisition of syntactic structures in Italian by using a Sentence Repetition Task. We also assessed their language exposure across different age ranges (between 0 and 3, 3 and 6 and at 6 years) by using parental questionnaires. The results show that the acquisition of different syntactic structures is sensitive to different language exposure variables as related to different age ranges. We interpret the results as showing that the effects of language exposure on the acquisition of syntactic structures are modulated by their timing in monolingual language acquisition. Language exposure in critical periods seems to play a relevant role in bilingual language acquisition.