Fabrizio Arosio

Disambiguating Information and Memory Resources in Children's Processing of Italian Relative Clauses.

We investigated the role of number agreement on verb and of animacy in the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in 51 monolingual Italian-speaking children, mean age 9:33, tested through a self-paced listening experiment with a final comprehension question. A digit span test and a listening span test were also administered to examine the role of memory in comprehension. Subject relative clauses were easier to comprehend than object relative clauses; animacy of the relative clause head improved comprehension of object relative clauses; memory, as measured by the digit span test, modulates comprehension of object relative clauses, both with animate and inanimate heads, as shown in response accuracy. Although all children process number agreement morphology on the verb, only some perform a correct reanalysis, as shown by the accuracy measures. We argue that number agreement disambiguation is particularly taxing for children, as it provides a negative symptom in the sense of Fodor and Inoue (J Psycholinguist Res 29(1):25–36, 2000) and reanalysis requires them to hold two dependencies in memory.

Interference in the production of Italian subject and object wh-questions

We investigate the production of subject and object who- and which-questions in the Italian of 4- to 5-year-olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy in the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in the Spec of the verb phrase. We show that different avoidance strategies are attempted by the child to get around this interference, all boiling down to a double checking of agreement: AGREE and Spec-Head. Then, we evaluate our approach from a cross-linguistic perspective and offer an account of the differences observed across early languages. Because our account seems to call both for a grammatical and a processing explanation, we end with a critical discussion of this dichotomy.

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.

Morphological Information and Memory Resources in Children's Processing of Relative Clauses in German

We investigated the processing of agreement marking and case marking in the comprehension of German relative clauses in 48 seven-year-old monolingual German-speaking children in a picture selection task. We examined the relation between the effectiveness of these different morphological cues and individual memory resources as measured by a digit-span test. Relative clauses were disambiguated either by agreement marking on the embedded verb or by case marking on the embedded determiner phrase. The results show that subject-extracted relative clauses (subject RCs) are more easily comprehended than object-extracted relative clauses (object RCs) and that case disambiguation is more effective than agreement disambiguation. Moreover, we found a relation between individual phonological short-term memory and the effectiveness of the different disambiguating cues in the comprehension of object RCs but not in the comprehension of subject RCs. We found that: (i) children with a low-digit span score have difficulties in the comprehension of case and agreement disambiguated object RCs, (ii) children with a medium-digit span score have difficulties in the comprehension of agreement disambiguated object RCs but not difficulties with case disambiguated object RCs, and (iii) children with a larger digit span score have no difficulties in the comprehension of agreement and case disambiguated object RCs. We explain our results under the Diagnosis and Repair Model (Fodor & Inoue, 2000) by arguing that children by age 7 have adult-like competence and processing strategies for these structures and that observable differences depend on individual memory resources as measured by a digit span task.

Morphosyntax and logical abilities in Italian poor readers: The problem of SLI under-identification

The study investigated morphosyntactic abilities and semantic-pragmatic competence in 24 children with developmental dyslexia aged 7 -12 years. Morphosyntactic abilities were investgated in a direct object clitic production task, semantic-pragmatic competence in a quantifier comprehension task. Children with dyslexia produced fewer clitics than their age controls and vocabulary controls. Ten children with dyslexia scored less than 1.5 SD below the mean score of an additional group of 89 children of the same age, selected across a range of oral and reading abilities. No difference was found in quantifier comprehension. These findings suggest that a large number of children with dyslexia are likely to be affected by SLI, although not diagnosed, and the authors recommend language assessment, including assessment of clitic production, when children are referred for dyslexia. By capitalizing on theories that see SLI as a deficit in the processing of complex aspects of linguistic relations, the authors argue that the production of clitics is particularly challenging because of their syntactic and morphosyntactic complexity.

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.

The production of direct object clitics in pre-school– and primary school–aged children with specific language impairments

ABSTRACT Third-person direct object (DO) clitic pronoun production is examined through an elicited production method in pre-school– and primary school–aged groups of Italian children with specific language impairment (SLI) to establish whether there is an improvement from age 5 years to age 7 years and whether there are qualitative differences in the two groups’ responses. It was found that 5- and 7-year-old Italian children with SLI produce fewer third-person DO clitics than same-age peers. The kind of responses they provide changes: at 5 years, children with SLI tend to omit clitics, while at 7 years, they use a full noun. Production of third-person DO clitics is a persistent challenge for children with SLI and is confirmed to be a good clinical marker both at 5 and 7 years of age.

How do 5-year-olds understand questions? Differences in languages across Europe

The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 different languages, and 7 language (sub-)families. The study investigated the effects of two factors on question formation: (a) whether the question contains a simple interrogative word like ‘who’ or a complex one like ‘which princess’, and (b) whether the question word was related to the sentential subject or object position of the verb. The findings show that there is considerable variation among languages, but the two factors mentioned consistently affect children’s performance. The cross-linguistic variation shows that three linguistic factors facilitate children’s understanding of questions: having overt case morphology, having a single lexical item for both ‘who’ and ‘which’, and the use of synthetic verbal forms.

The production of wh-questions in Italian-speaking children with SLI

ABSTRACT We aim at determining whether 7-year-old Italian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI): (1) have problems with the production of wh- questions; (2) display a subject/object asymmetry in producing which- and who questions; (3) attempt to simplify questions, especially which- questions; (4) have difficulties with movement and verbal agreement in wh- questions. We elicited subject and object who and which NP questions in 10 children with SLI (M = 7;2), in 10 chronological age (CA)-matched controls (M = 7;2) and 10 language-matched controls (M = 5;2). Results showed that (1) children with SLI produced fewer questions than both control groups; (2) a subject/object asymmetry was observed in who questions but not in which NP questions; (3) which NP questions were more problematic than who questions; (4) children with SLI produced more agreement errors and resorted to simplification strategies to avoid wh- question production. Results point to a grammatical deficit due to the computation of complex grammatical relations and suggest that there is a misalignment among pieces of linguistic competence needed to form Italian wh- questions (wh- movement and agreement computation). Outcomes have implications for clinical assessment recommending the production of wh- questions to be considered in the evaluation of SLI in Italian.

Semantic and Pragmatic Abilities Can Be Spared in Italian Children with SLI

ABSTRACT Specific language impairment (SLI) is a heterogeneous disorder affecting various aspects of language. While most studies have investigated impairments in the domain of syntax and morphosyntax, little is known about compositional semantics and the process of deriving pragmatic meanings in SLI. We selected a group of sixteen monolingual Italian-speaking children with SLI (mean-age 7;4) with a severe morphosyntactic deficit at the receptive and expressive level. We tested their comprehension of quantified sentences including all and some in order to establish whether they were competent with the logical and pragmatic meanings of these quantifiers. Children performed as well as their typically developing controls in understanding logical meanings. In comprehending pragmatic meanings, they obtained lower scores than age-matched controls but they were not different from language-matched children. However, differences in this ability correlated positively with age and with the ability to understand simple sentences in the SLI group. This suggests that aspects of the syntactic component might be involved in the development of this ability and that, despite their severe morphosyntactic deficits, children with SLI might catch up with their peers in deriving pragmatic meanings.