Failure to produce direct object clitic pronouns as a clinical marker of SLI in school-aged Italian speaking children |
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Authors: | Fabrizio Arosio Chiara Branchini Lina Barbieri Maria Teresa Guasti |
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Affiliation: | 1. Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Milano-BicoccaMilanoItaly;2. Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati, Università Ca’ Foscari VeneziaVeneziaItaly;3. Centro di Psicomotricità di LodiLodiItaly |
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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. |
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Keywords: | Clitic pronouns Italian specific language impairment |
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