(Pseudo-)Relatives and prepositional infinitival constructions in the acquisition of European Portuguese

The literature on attachment preferences in relative clauses discusses a crosslinguistic difference in attachment, which, as Fodor (1998a) remarks, poses problems for acquisition. Following previous claims on the universality of the parser, and attempts to explain crosslinguistic variation in attachment with properties of the languages, in particular the availability of pseudo-relatives, we analyzed children's performance in attaching preferences with relative clauses and prepositional infinitival constructions and found that their preferences in parsing are guided by independently needed and crosslinguistically robust principles.