Production and comprehension of rhetorical questions in the acquisition of Italian as a first language

Abstract

This paper investigates rhetorical questions (RhQs) in monolingual children acquiring Italian, comparing the comprehension and production of RhQs based on their optional lexical, morphosyntactic, and prosodic cues. We show that 6-to-9-year-old children are in the process of acquiring the use of optional lexical and morphosyntactic markers in production (e.g., discourse particles, information structure), but only 9-year-olds show adult-like patterns. In comprehension, children from age 7 were able to consistently recognize RhQs through a combination of prosodic and lexico-syntactic cues, but only some children were able to do so based on prosody alone. Furthermore, the production frequency of lexico-syntactic markers correlated with accuracy in the comprehension task when a lexico-syntactic marker was involved. Our results suggest that the acquisition of RhQs and their pragmatic marking is still ongoing throughout the primary school years, in line with other phenomena at the interface between different modules of language, pragmatics, and communicative competence.