UN COMPITO DI PRODUZIONE ELICITATA PER LA VALUTAZIONE DELL’ITALIANO PARLATO: LE FRASI PASSIVE E LE FRASI ATTIVE CON PRONOME CLITICO

A new elicited production task inducing oral production of actional passive sentences was carried out by school-aged Italian-speaking children with typical development or with Developmental Dyslexia. All children favored active structures with accusative clitic pronouns referring to the patient over passive structures. Oral production of clitic pronouns has been shown to be impaired in Italian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment and/or dyslexia (Bortolini et al., 2006; Arosio et al., 2010; Zachou et al., 2012; Guasti, 2013), while comprehension and production of actional passives do not seem to be particularly problematic in dyslexic children and dyslexic adults, with few exceptions (Reggiani, 2009; Cardinaletti and Volpato, 2011, 2015; Arosio et al. 2013; Franceschini and Volpato 2014 for hearing-impaired children). Accordingly, qualitative differences in clitic production emerge in our study between typically and atypically developing children, while we do not observe any remarkable difference concerning production of passive sentences. The task employed in the experiment allows us to elicit, analyze and compare production of different typologies of pronominal and non pronominal structures and shows how the linguistic field can contribute to the study of (typical and atypical) language acquisition.