We administrated a clitic elicitation task to 16 school-aged Italian speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) in order to investigated whether the failure to produce third person direct object clitics (DO clitics) is a persistent clinical marker of SLI in Italian; we examined whether this failure also extends to reflexive clitics. Results show that Italian children with SLI aged 6 to 9;11 years fail to produce DO clitics and tend to produce a lexical noun introduced by a determiner (full DP) in the argument postverbal position instead of the pronoun; the production of reflexive clitics is preserved in the same population. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses and computation of likelihood ratios show that the failure to produce DO clitics is a persistent good clinical marker of SLI in Italian. We argue that DO clitic production requires complex morphosyntactic operations that are hardly achieved by children with SLI; our findings are compatible with theories considering SLI as a deficit of processing complex linguistic relations. © 2014 Informa UK Ltd. All rights reserved: reproduction in whole or part not permitted.

Failure to produce direct object clitic pronouns as a clinical marker of SLI in school-aged Italian speaking children

BRANCHINI, CHIARA;
2014-01-01

Abstract

We administrated a clitic elicitation task to 16 school-aged Italian speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) in order to investigated whether the failure to produce third person direct object clitics (DO clitics) is a persistent clinical marker of SLI in Italian; we examined whether this failure also extends to reflexive clitics. Results show that Italian children with SLI aged 6 to 9;11 years fail to produce DO clitics and tend to produce a lexical noun introduced by a determiner (full DP) in the argument postverbal position instead of the pronoun; the production of reflexive clitics is preserved in the same population. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses and computation of likelihood ratios show that the failure to produce DO clitics is a persistent good clinical marker of SLI in Italian. We argue that DO clitic production requires complex morphosyntactic operations that are hardly achieved by children with SLI; our findings are compatible with theories considering SLI as a deficit of processing complex linguistic relations. © 2014 Informa UK Ltd. All rights reserved: reproduction in whole or part not permitted.
File in questo prodotto:
File Dimensione Formato  
2014-failure to produce-arosio_branchini_barbieri_guasti_2014.pdf

non disponibili

Tipologia: Documento in Post-print
Licenza: Accesso chiuso-personale
Dimensione 447.25 kB
Formato Adobe PDF
447.25 kB Adobe PDF   Visualizza/Apri

I documenti in ARCA sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10278/43281
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus 51
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 44
social impact