Postpositive adjectives in language acquisition: no bias for canonical word order

The psycholinguistic study of adjectives is an interesting domain of investigation for several reasons. From the semantic point of view, adjectives appear as “salient elements”, and adjectives with different connotations (for example positive vs negative) are shown to elicit different brain components (Bernat et al., 2001). From the morphological point of view, adjectives are interesting because the time needed to process them appears to be dependent on the inflectional richness of their category in a specific language, making them a prototypical ground for morphological research (Traficante Burani, 2003). From the syntactic point of view, adjectives are interesting because they display a number of varying configurations as noun modifiers across languages (and also within one language).