On the Acquisition of the Syntax of Romance

We investigate the comprehension of recursive locative adnominal PPs and subject RCs by Romanian monolinguals with a view to weighing the role of language specific properties (overt functional category encoding recursion and definiteness of the modified DP) in the acquisition of recursive structures. Our data show that comprehension of recursive nominal modifiers is delayed. Romanian 5- and 7-year-olds randomly assign a recursive or a conjunctive interpretation to recursive nominal modifiers. Th