Acquisition of clitic climbing by European Portuguese children

This study investigates the acquisition of clitic climbing by European Portuguese speaking children considering spontaneous production data from three children aged 1;5 to 3;11 (Santos’ corpus: Santos et al., 2014) and data from an elicited production task administered to 64 children aged 5;2 to 8;2. The study shows that: clitic climbing is acquired early, as expected for a parametric property that is dependent on the specification of the functional domain; there is early sensitivity to properties of the adult grammar, although children take a while to determine which specific verbs allow or disallow clitic climbing. In optional contexts younger children prefer clitic climbing constructions over non-climbing constructions. We discuss these results in light of the notion of complexity in language development.