title: The acquisition of accusative object clitics by IA children from China: evidence of early age effects?
abstract: The present study compared the performance of twenty-seven French-speaking internationally adopted (IA) children from China to that of twenty-seven monolingual non-adopted French-speaking children (CTL) matched for age, gender, and socioeconomic status on a Clitic Elicitation task. The IA children omitted significantly more accusative object clitics and made significantly more agreement errors using clitics than the CTL children. No other significant differences were found between the groups. The findings suggest that the adoptees may experience difficulties in morphosyntactic development possibly as a result of their delayed exposure to the adopted language.
authors.affiliation: McGill University,Canada.
authors.forename: Audrey
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Delcenserie
authors.affiliation: McGill University,Canada.
authors.forename: Fred
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Genesee
mesh_terms: D000300:Adoption; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002681:China; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000145:classification* / Q000209:etiology*; D014705:Verbal Behavior