Acquisition of Italian object clitics by a trilingual child

This paper describes the acquisition of Italian object pronouns by a trilingual girl who simultaneously acquires Italian, Russian, and Norwegian. Different processes were distinguished according to the subject’s age at the time of acquisition. Italian first- and second-person singular clitics were produced correctly during the first stage (at age 2;2) but were replaced by tonic forms after the age of three, while third-person singular clitics were used in a target-consistent manner. On the basis of these data I shall discuss different approaches to Italian clitics.