Determiners and Clitic Pronouns in French-Speaking Children With SLI

Abstract

This article presents the results of an investigation on elicited production and comprehension of determiners and clitic pronouns by 13 French-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) ages 5;7 to 13;0 years and a group of 20 normal children ages 5;6 to 5;11 years. Out findings show that the children with SLI studied here do not present a general impairment on functional categories or a general deficit in processing phonological weak elements. On the contrary, they all remain sensitive to the fundamental difference between determiners (Det and clitic pronouns. Their accuracy with respect to nominative and object clitic pronouns (reflexive and accusative) varies according to the categorial and syntactic properties of these elements. These findings confirm out linguistic analysis of Romance clitic pronouns that attributes a different status to Der and clitic pronouns and further views clitic pronouns as a nonhomogeneous class.