Production of third-person direct object clitics in children with cochlear implants speaking Italian

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that the production of third-person singular accusative object clitics (3DO clitics) might be taxing in Italian-speaking pre-school children with cochlear implants (CIs). We investigated this topic by assessing 3DO clitic production in 14 children with an average age of 8 years, who had received CI between age 1 and 4. The first goal of the study was to analyze whether school-aged children with CIs exhibit atypical behavior in 3DO clitic production. The second goal was to analyze whether children with CIs are prone to agreement errors in case of gender mismatch between the subject and the 3DO clitic, as has been shown for normal-hearing, typically developing children. To achieve this, we used two tasks in which subject and object clitic grammatical genders were manipulated so that they would or would not match. As for the first goal, the majority of children with CIs had good performance on the clitic tasks. However, some participants’ performance was poor. The pattern of deviant responses differed among the poor performers. We believe that children with CIs showing impairments in 3DO clitic production need careful individual analysis in order to plan effective speech therapy. As for the second goal, children with CIs were more prone to agreement errors in the mismatch condition compared to the match condition; this dimension needs to be considered when assessing and eventually rehabilitating clitic production.

KEYWORDS:

• Direct object clitics
• cochlear implant
• Italian
• language development

Acknowledgments

Many thanks are due to the children who participated in the study and to their parents.

Declarations of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹ Difficulties in the acquisition of 3DO clitics have been reported in various Romance languages (see Varlokosta et al., 2016).

² When assessing the linguistic outcomes of children with CI, the type of stimulation used (unilateral vs. bilateral) is another important point. For what concerns the present study, our sample size was small and we did not consider it appropriate to divide it into subgroups. However, as a note, a U test for audibility and speech perception in quiet test showed homogeneous results between children with unilateral and bilateral implants.

³ How prompt is “prompt”? According to the Year 2019 Position Statement of the Joint Committee on Infant Hearing (2019), CIs are suitable for children around 12 months of age, and better outcomes are achieved from those implanted by age 2, as suggested, for example, by Ching et al. (2009) and Dettman et al. (2007).