title: Failure to produce direct object clitic pronouns as a clinical marker of SLI in school-aged Italian speaking children.
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.
authors: Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca , Milano , Italy .
authors: Fabrizio
authors: F
authors: Arosio
authors: Chiara
authors: C
authors: Branchini
authors: Lina
authors: L
authors: Barbieri
authors: Maria Teresa
authors: MT
authors: Guasti
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics
keywords: Clitic pronouns; Italian; specific language impairment