Clitic pronouns and past participle agreement in Italian in three hearing-impaired bilinguals Italian/LIS.

The aim of this study is to assess the comprehension and to elicit the production of clitic pronouns in sentences with left-dislocation, in three adult hearing impaired bilinguals Italian/LIS and in four hearing speakers of Italian. The occurrence of clitic pronouns and the presence of past participle agreement in Italian are investigated through sentence completion and grammaticality judgement tasks. Results suggest that, in spite of late exposure to the oral language due to hearing impairment, the linguistic competence of the hearing impaired individuals is quite intact and the syntactic information is correctly projected in the syntactic tree. Because of a very selective impairment in the morphology of clitic pronouns, only a qualitative analysis of the errors is possible. The non-standard forms are discussed within the framework of the recent research on Φ-features from a syntactic, morpho-phonological and psycholinguistic point of view. The statistically significant better performance on plural clitic pronouns as opposed to singular ones confirms the findings of previous studies on gender and number features and proves once again that number information is retrieved earlier than gender information.