Chiara Branchini

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.

CLAD-ITA GAPS: un test di screening delle abilità fonologiche e morfo-sintattiche in bambini con un Disturbo Specifico del Linguaggio

Summary. Ninenteen children (5-9 years old) diagnosed with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) were administered a screening test consisting of a sentence repetition and a non-word repetition task that is currently under standardization. This test is an adaptation to Italian of an English test (GAPS; Gardner, Froud, McClelland e Van der Lely, 2006)) and taps morphosyntactic and phonological dimensions that are clinical markers of SLI in Italian. SLI children performed poorly in both tasks as compared to three control groups: an age-matched controls, and two verbal-age matched groups (matched for morpho-syntactic and lexical comprehension, respectively). The sensitivity and the specificity of both tests indicated that each task and the combined score of both of them permit to correctly identify children with SLI from typically developing children.