title: The effects of production demands on grammatical weaknesses in specific language impairment: the case of clitic pronouns in Italian.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Extended optional use of direct object clitic pronouns (e.g., la in Paula la vede ["Paula sees her"]) appears to be a clinical marker for specific language impairment (SLI) in Italian. In this study, we examined whether sentence production demands might influence the degree to which Italian-speaking children with SLI produced clitics.
  
  
  METHODS
  Preschool-age children with SLI ( n = 15) and 2 groups of younger typically developing children ( n = 15 each) participated. Production demands were varied through use of a syntactic priming task.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The children with SLI were more likely than the comparison children to omit the clitic in a control condition in which they had to describe a target picture without the benefit of a preceding sentence prime. The children with SLI were also more likely to describe target pictures using a default clitic or a clitic that had appeared in the preceding prime sentence but was inappropriate for the target.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The findings suggest that children with SLI have difficulty generating a sentence containing a grammatical slot for a clitic when production demands are increased, and when they succeed in generating such a sentence, they often cannot at the same time retrieve the appropriate clitic form.
authors.affiliation: Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. xdxl@purdue.edu
authors.forename: Laurence B
authors.initials: LB
authors.lastname: Leonard
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dispaldro
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007558:Italy; D007802:Language; D007805:Language Development Disorders; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics; D013060:Speech; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: language disorders; specific language impairment; syntax