Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Key concepts of language acquisition research -- 3 Tense, aspect and grounding -- 4 The acquisition of tense and aspect in Romance languages -- 5 The acquisition of tense and aspect in Italian -- 6 Methodology -- 7 Results of the obligatory occasion analysis -- 8 Results of the frequency analysis -- 9 The effect of lexical aspect on the distribution of past tense morphology -- 10 Discussion -- Bibliography -- Index