The effect of a priming-based training on the production of object clitic pronouns in Italian speaking children with DLD

ABSTRACT

Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) have impaired morphosyntactic abilities despite age-appropriate nonverbal cognitive abilities and no hearing disorders or brain injury. The persistent omission of third-person object clitic pronouns (3DO clitics) has been proven to be a clinical marker of developmental language disorders (DLD) for both preschool and school-aged Italian-speaking children. According to the model of 3DO clitic derivation recently brought to attention, 3DO clitic omission is a morphosyntactic matter and, therefore, we argue that the production of 3DO clitics can be enhanced through morphosyntactic priming in children with DLD. To corroborate this hypothesis, we administered a 3DO clitic training based on a morphosyntactic priming paradigm to 23 typically developing (TD) children and 11 children with DLD. Results show that their 3DO clitic production is enhanced after the training and that these effects are persistent in time. Our results suggest that a priming-based training can concretely help children with DLD in their language development.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• developmental language disorders
• Italian
• clitics
• morphosyntactic priming
• implicit intervention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, GB, upon reasonable request https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/data-sharing/share-your-data/data-availability-statements/.

Notes

¹ For the glosses, we adopted the following abbreviations: 3DO: singular third-person direct object clitic; PP: past participle; F: feminine; M: masculine; S: singular; P: plural.

² In these studies, as well as in most of the literature we mentioned in this paper, DLD (Developmental Language Disorder) is referred to as SLI (Specific Language Impairment). In this paper, we used the DLD terminology as supported by Bishop et al. (2017).

³ According to models of clitic sentence derivation (e.g. Belletti, 1999), the verbal past participle gender and number morphology is dependent on the clitic gender and number features, even they are not spelled out morphologically. For this reason, although clitic contracted forms occurring in present perfect sentences are not marked for gender, we decided to classify present perfect sentences with clitic contracted forms and with verbal past participle not agreeing with the clitic antecedent as wrong form. Productions with the past participle not in agreement with the clitic antecedent were only 12 out of the 1590 answers we collected.

⁴ See Table 9 and Table 10 in the Appendix for the distribution of the different Other responses at the pre-, post- and late-evaluation in the three groups.

⁵ Infelicitous grammatical other responses were only two samples produced by TD children at the pre-evaluation (‘il bambino sta correndo’ [the boy is running]; ‘è stata catturata’ [she was caught]).

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.