Mapping pronoun processing difficulties in Italian adults and children

Pronouns are referring expressions that can be used to refer back to entities previously mentioned in the discourse. In contrast to speakers of English, speakers of the pro-drop language Italian can use either an overt pronoun (e.g., lui ‘he’) or a null pronoun (O) as a subject anaphor. In Italian, null pronouns generally refer to the discourse topic, whereas overt pronouns refer to a non-topic referent (Carminati, 2002). However, this is merely a preference and interpretations of null as well as overt pronouns can vary, for example on the basis of pragmatic plausibility (Carminati, 2002) or recency of the non-topic referent (Sorace & Filiaci, 2006).