Abstract

Two studies involving 143 children aged between 2-4 years are presented in order to evaluate the reliability and the validity of a sentence repetition task assessing the early grammatical development in Italian. Results show a strong test-retest reliability, significant differences between the age groups performance and significant correlations with the children's spontaneous production of and with the parents report to the italian version of the Mac Arthur Communicative Inventory (PVB). The task highlights the same developmental stages reported in the literature on the topic and provides a reliable Mean Lenght of Utterance (MLU) measure.