The Determiner System in a Group of Italian Children With SLI

Abstract

Omission of functional categories by children with specific language impairment (SLI) is often viewed as a manifestation of the same immaturity characterizing young normal children's grammar. In this article we present and discuss data that challenge this view: atypically high omissions or even almost total absence of determiners in the speech productions of a group of 11 Italian children affected by either expressive/receptive (7) or expressive-only (4) SLI. We show that this pattern of omissions is in contrast with mean length of utterance matched normal controls' behavior and is not predicted by the level of morphosyntactic knowledge (which includes control of many functional categories) reached by the children with SLI in the group. This rather peculiar dissociation calls into question some special properties of determiners. We take into consideration two possible explanations (which may correlate with differences in deficit type): (i) a deeply rooted learning deficit and (ii) difficulties or problems in the output mechanisms. We argue that in either case the source of the deficit has to be sought in the non-accessibility to or in the misappreciation of one fundamental syntactic property of determiners: their role of elements that assign argumenthood to nominal expressions (Longobardi (1994-), Szabolcsi (1917). This conclusion, besides supporting recent theoretical accounts of determiner phrases, has some intriguing implications for a global characterization and identification of the grammatical locus of SLI.