Data from 996 Italian-speaking children were collected and analyzed to assess whether a movement-based notion of grammatical complexity is adequate to capture the developmental trend of clitics and passives in Italian. A second goal of the study was to address the relationship between working memory and syntactic development, exploring the hypothesis that higher digit span values predict better comprehension of complex matrix sentences. The results confirm the validity of a ranking of grammatical structures based on constituent movement, with both clitics and passives developing in parallel and later than canonical SVO sentences. Working memory also shows an effect on sentence comprehension in general, but standard measures (digit span forward/backward) do not show a selective advantage in handling complex constructions such as clitics and passives.

中文翻译：

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一千个孩子告诉我们关于语法复杂性和工作记忆的事情：对意大利语附着词和被动语态理解的横断面分析

收集并分析了 996 名意大利语儿童的数据，以评估基于动作的语法复杂性概念是否足以捕捉意大利语中附属词和被动语态的发展趋势。该研究的第二个目标是解决工作记忆和句法发展之间的关系，探索这样的假设：较高的数字跨度值预示着对复杂矩阵句子的更好理解。结果证实了基于成分运动的语法结构排序的有效性，附着词和被动语态的发展与规范的 SVO 句子并行且晚。工作记忆总体上也显示出对句子理解的影响，但标准测量（数字跨度向前/向后）在处理诸如附加词和被动语态等复杂结构时并没有表现出选择性优势。