An asymmetry in the acquisition of accusative clitics in child Romanian

Coene, Martine; Avram, Larisa

doi:10.1515/9783110259179.39

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…In contrast to the bulk of studies discussed above, few investigations have been conducted of clitics in typically developing French other than those of the 3rd person (except for Hamann et al, 1996, who counted all accusative clitics and Tuller et al, 2011 described below). For other Romance languages, a few authors have observed an asymmetric development between 3rd person (5) and 1st/2nd person ACC (6), with the former emerging slower than the latter (Avram and Coene, 2008;Baauw, 2000;Coene and Avram, 2011;Gavarró and Fortó n, 2014;Silva, 2010;Tsimpli and Mastropavlou, 2007): 5Jean le/la regarde John him/her looks-at 'John is looking at him/her' 6Jean me/te regarde John me/you looks-at 'John is looking at me/you' Coene and Avram (2011) analyzed longitudinal corpora of the speech of two monolingual Romanian children (aged 1;05--3;05) and found that in obligatory clitic contexts, ACC of the third person were frequently omitted until age 3 years, while those of the first and second person were always present from the earliest utterances. This asymmetric omission pattern was also observed for very young Catalan-speaking children (Gavarró and Fortó n, 2014), for Greek-speaking children with SLI aged 3;5 to 7 (Tsimpli, 2001) and for adult L2 learners (Tsimpli and Mastropavlou, 2007).…”

Section: Rd Person Vs 1st Person Accmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their complexity has positioned them as a clinical marker of specific language impairment or 'SLI' (Paradis et al, 2003;Parisse and Maillart, 2004) and more generally of atypical language development (Delage, 2008;Tuller et al, 2011). More recently, it has been suggested for Greek, Romanian and Catalan that not all ACC are equally difficult (Avram et al, 2015;Coene and Avram, 2011;Gavarró and Fortó n, 2014;Tsimpli and Mastropavlou, 2007). Instead what appears to be problematic is specifically 3rd person clitics, while 1st and 2nd person ACC prove to be relatively simpler.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Disentangling sources of difficulty associated with the acquisition of accusative clitics in French

Delage

Durrleman

Frauenfelder

2016

Lingua

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Accusative clitic pronouns are acquired later than both nominative and reflexive pronouns in typically developing French-speaking children. However recent research suggests that not all these clitics are equally difficult, 3rd person accusative clitics (ACC3) being more problematic than 1st and 2nd person. In this study, we explored three properties which could make ACC3 complex: (1) gender marking, (2) discourse-participant independent reference, and (3) optionality in spoken French. We have created specific experiments assessing the role of each of these properties in clitic acquisition in 41 French-speaking children aged 4-8. Results show that all three properties play a role in making ACC3 complex, with the strongest influence coming from gender marking. Implications of these results are discussed in light of previous related studies.

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Section: Rd Person Vs 1st Person Accmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disentangling sources of difficulty associated with the acquisition of accusative clitics in French

Delage

Durrleman

Frauenfelder

2016

Lingua

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“…Prosodic/phonological explanations have been challenged by studies comparing the production of 3DO clitics to the production of functional morphemes with identical prosodic/phonological features, such as determiners, reflexive clitics, subject clitics and first and second person DO clitics. According to these studies, children have less problems in the production of reflexive clitics, subject clitics and definite determiners (Hamann et al, 1996;Jakubowicz et al, 1998;Bedore and Leonard, 2001;Audollent and Tuller, 2003;Smith et al, 2008;Zesiger et al, 2010;Gavarró, 2012;Arosio et al, 2014), and they have less problems with the production of first and second person DO clitics (Tsimpli and Mastropavlou, 2007;Zesiger et al, 2010;Coene and Avram, 2011;Tuller et al, 2011;Gavarró and Fortón, 2014;Delage et al, 2016).…”

Section: The Acquisition Of 3do Cliticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agreement and Interference in Direct Object Clitic Production in Italian Monolingual Children

Arosio

Giustolisi

2019

Front. Commun.

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Italian speaking typically developing children optionally omit third person direct object clitics (3DO) until at least age 4 years. In a set of two studies, we investigated whether clitic omissions depend on intervention phenomena. We discussed a model of syntactic intervention in 3DO clitic production in which the subject of a sentence might intervene in clitic production at an intermediate stage of the sentence derivation, when the clitic moves from its initial merging position to a higher position above the subject. We argued that omissions and errors in 3DO clitic productions arise when retrieving from memory the clitic to achieve an agreement relation in a context of syntactic intervention. We argued that working memory limitations impact on the clitic retrieving operation cued by lexical and representational features. In Study 1, we elicited the production of third singular clitics in sentences with a full lexical subject. The third singular subject and the third singular clitic were matched or not in gender. Results of Study 1 showed that when there is a gender feature mismatch between the subject and the 3DO clitic children optionally make clitic gender errors or even replace the 3DO clitic with a post-verbal full DP. We argued that these results could be explained in an intervention model in which the external verb lexical argument (the lexical subject) is erroneously retrieved for achieving the agreement operation involving the movement of the clitic to its surface position. In Study 2 we investigated whether the problems in clitic production found in Study 1 depend on phonological priming or structural intervention. We elicited the production of third singular clitics in sentences with a silent pro subject. As in Study 1, the third singular subject and the third singular clitic were matched or not in gender. Results of Study 2 showed that in sentences with a mismatch in gender features between the null subject and the clitic, children tend to produce a clitic with the incorrect gender or to optionally replace it with a full lexical post-verbal DP, regardless of the gender of the target clitic. This suggests that a null subject intervenes in the same way a lexical subject does in the derivation of clitics and, consequently, that the gender features inherited by a null subject via its anaphoric link with its antecedent have the same grammatical status of gender features conveyed at a lexical level. Overall results indicate that the interference errors are not dependent on phonological attraction but rather have a structural nature and are modulated by short-term memory resources.

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“…In contrast to the vast amount of studies that have focused on third person accusative clitics in TD and SLI, few investigations have been conducted for clitics other than those of the third person. However, authors who have examined first person clitics have observed that they emerge earlier than those of the third person (2), (Tsimpli & Mastropavlou, 2007;Avram & Coene, 2008;Coene & Avram, 2011;Author & Coauthors, to appear A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 11 children with SLI aged 3;5 to 7 years (Tsimpli, 2001) and for adult L2 learners (Tsimpli & Mastropavlou, 2007 A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 12 -masculine, la -feminine), although not on ACC1 (me -either masculine or feminine).…”

Section: Accusative Clitic Pronouns and Their Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Autism Spectrum Disorder and Specific Language Impairment: Overlaps in Syntactic Profiles

Durrleman

Delage

2016

Language Acquisition

102

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Investigating syntax in autism: Comparisons with SLI, links with cognition Recent work exploring syntax in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has identified morphosyntactic deficits and argued that these are independent of non-verbal reasoning. More specifically, researchers have now claimed that subgroups with ASD have syntactic profiles reminiscent of Specific Language Impairment (SLI), the latter showing a dissociation between language deficits and non-verbal intelligence. With this work, we investigate the nature of syntactic impairment in ASD, its parallelism with SLI and its potential relation to other aspects of cognition, namely non-verbal intelligence, working memory and theory of mind (ToM). We focus on a clinical marker of SLI that has scarcely been studied in ASD, namely 3rd person accusative clitic production, which has moreover been hypothesized to solicit working memory Downloaded by [La Trobe University] at 13:53 31 May 2016A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 2 resources. We also explore 1st person accusative clitic production, largely preserved in SLI but hypothesized to be specifically affected in ASD due to reported difficulties with pronouns of the 1st and 2nd person, arguably related to difficulties in ToM.Our participants included 21 individuals with ASD (aged 5-16), 22 individuals with SLI (aged 5-16) of similar age, as well as age-matched and younger controls. Experimental tasks were conducted to evaluate the production of 1st and 3rd person accusative clitics, the latter being a clinical marker of syntactic impairment. We also administered standardized tasks assessing general morphosyntax, verbal working memory (digit-span tasks and non-word repetition), nonverbal reasoning (Raven's Progressive Matrices) and ToM (Sally-Anne).Overall scores for both clinical groups reveal quantitatively similar deficits for 3rd person accusative clitics and general morphosyntax. However upon closer inspection a significant subgroup of children with ASD showed intact grammatical skills. The only weakness identified across the entire ASD population was for 1st person clitics, which was mastered by children with SLI. However the task used to elicit these required perspective shifting and thus the lower scores which resulted can be accounted for in terms of the well-documented ToM deficits in ASD. This is further supported by the observation that better scores at ToM tasks led to improved performance with 1st person accusative clitics. In addition, difficulties on all working memory measures were revealed for ASD and SLI and crucially found to correlate only with performance on 3rd person clitics in both groups. In contrast, non-verbal reasoning did not correlate with any syntactic measures.

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An asymmetry in the acquisition of accusative clitics in child Romanian

Cited by 6 publications

References 15 publications

Disentangling sources of difficulty associated with the acquisition of accusative clitics in French

Disentangling sources of difficulty associated with the acquisition of accusative clitics in French

Agreement and Interference in Direct Object Clitic Production in Italian Monolingual Children

Autism Spectrum Disorder and Specific Language Impairment: Overlaps in Syntactic Profiles

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