Children acquiring Italian go through a stage in which articles are optionally omitted, though, when used, they are used appropriately. This to some extent seems to challenge the Continuity Hypothesis, i.e. the assumption that every stage of language development should be UG compatible.
With experimental data, the article shows that alternations between presence and absence of articles in the acquisition of Italian are best accounted for assuming that articles in child language obey the same syntactic restrictions as in the target language, but may be deleted at the surface by virtue of a series of prosodic constraints.
