Pragmatica nell’uso dei pronomi clitici diretti di terza persona singolare in bambini dislessici con e senza disturbo specifico del linguaggio

Omission of direct object clitic pronouns (DOCLs) is a cross-linguistically spread phenomenon among children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) also display difficulties with the production of DOCLs. Besides (morpho)syntactic skills, clitic use requires a range of abilities including pragmatic skills. The present study explores the role of pragmatics in the omission of DOCLs in Italian. Various pragmatically inadequate strategies are used by SLI and younger DD children in order to compensate for (morpho)syntactic deficits, such as the production of noun phrases to avoid clitic pronouns, present-perfect sentences with contracted clitics instead of antecedent-clitic agreement, and sentences that are unrelated to the context. After age 10, DD children show no difficulties anymore, suggesting that different reasons may underlie problems in using DOCLs by SLI and DD children.