List processing & acquisition

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Lists have been described as tools to approximate and reformulate meaning, especially in cases of lexical search when the speaker is experiencing processing difficulties. Such phenomena have been identified in language acquisition (Bonvino et al. 2016), language contact situations (Fiorentini and Goria 2016) but are commonly attested also in spoken discourse of adult native speakers. Probably due to their iconicity with respect to the basic operation of combining items into a set, list constructions may reveal specific directions of inferencing or associative reasoning followed by the speaker.

Furthermore, certain lists are likely to be more easy to process than others (e.g. additive lists are probably easier than categorizing lists) and this may depend on a restricted set of parameters: semantic compositionality, syntactic complexity, degree of abstraction required for the list interpretation, degree of context dependence.

We aim to

  • investigate the differences in ease of processing of the various functions of lists in first language acquisition. We expect that the ability to build and understand lists is acquired at successive stages by children, mirroring different degrees of semantic, inferential and syntactic complexity
  • investigate the use of lists in second language acquisition, especially with respect to its uses as problem solving tools
  • investigate list constructions in bilingual situations, where sociolinguistic asymmetries may reveal pragmatic and cognitive functions of lists