The effects of production demands on grammatical weaknesses in specific language impairment: the case of clitic pronouns in Italian.
PURPOSE
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.


METHOD
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.
['Leonard|Laurence B|LB|', 'Dispaldro|Marco|M|']
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
specific language impairment language disorders syntax