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.