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

Delage, Hélène; Durrleman, Stéphanie; Frauenfelder, Ulrich Hans

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2016.03.005

Cited by 16 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…According to phonological-prosodic accounts, 3DO clitics are omitted since they are functional elements realized by monosyllabic weak morphemes with short duration that are not prone to straightforward grammaticalization [Leonard's surface Hypothesis-(Leonard, 1998) and subsequent research inspired by the hypothesis]; according to Wexler's maturational account (Wexler, 1998(Wexler, , 2003; and subsequent research adopting this hypothesis), young children only achieve one agreement operation on a constituent, and 3DO clitics are omitted in Italian because they are involved in more than one syntactic agreement operation in this language. More recent research argued that the processing, the storing and the retrieval of gender and person features associated to 3DO is challenging for children [see discussion and references in Delage et al (2016)]. In our study, we will argue that these explanations are problematic and that problems in 3DO clitics production depend on challenging syntactic operations of 3DO clitic derivation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 75%

“…These properties mainly characterize 3DO clitic pronouns in Italian. In what follows, we will concentrate on third person clitic pronouns because they have been the focus of extensive acquisition research which has yielded some interesting findings; for instance, a number of studies have shown that the production and comprehension of first and second person direct object clitics is relatively unproblematic, while third person clitics are challenging [see Delage et al (2016) for an extensive discussion e references found there]. In the next sections, we will sketch the main features of the syntactic theories accounting for Italian 3DO clitics and we will discuss some acquisition data in both typical and atypical language development.…”

Section: Italian 3do Clitics: Their Features Their Acquisition Theimentioning

confidence: 99%

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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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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 75%

Section: Italian 3do Clitics: Their Features Their Acquisition Theimentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Arosio

Giustolisi

2019

Front. Commun.

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“…In a context of language contact, SNs, despite being native speakers, may also experience some degree of variation when extracting, processing and integrating the syntactic, semantic and specific morphological information of a word with its concept that affects the mapping of gender features onto clitics. As mentioned in the introduction, evidence for this difficulty with third person clitics has also be found in French L1 monolingual acquisition (Delage et al 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 67%

“…Difficulties in the L2 acquisition of gender features affects not only nouns but also pronominal forms. In the case of accusative clitics, in addition to evidence of difficulties in the acquisition of gender among L2 learners (Grüter 2005;Mayer and Sánchez 2016), there is evidence from child monolingual acquisition of French that clitics marked for gender (third person) are more difficult to acquire than those not marked for it (first and second person) (Delage et al 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Typological Differences in Morphological Patterns, Gender Features, and Thematic Structure in the L2 Acquisition of Ashaninka Spanish

Sánchez

Mayer

2018

Languages

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It has been widely argued that morphological competence, particularly functional morphology, represents the bottleneck of second language acquisition (Jensen et al. 2017;Lardiere 1998Lardiere , 2005Slabakova 2008Slabakova , 2009Slabakova , 2013. In this study, we explore three challenging aspects of the morphology of Spanish among advanced L1 Ashaninka-L2 Spanish speakers: (i) the acquisition of proclitics and enclitics with inflected verbs; (ii) the distribution of accusative clitics according to the thematic role of the direct object in anaphoric and doubling structures; and (iii) the distribution of clitic forms and their association with gender features. Our results show evidence of the L2 acquisition of clitic structures in L2 Spanish speakers, and no difference between native and L2 speakers regarding sensitivity to thematic roles. However, there are statistically significant differences between groups in the distribution of the gender specification of the clitic antecedents or doubled determiner phrases (DPs). We take these results as evidence in support of the view that morphological patterns can be acquired (proclitics vs. suffixes) as well as preferences for mapping thematic roles onto clitics, but subtle differences in the continuum of preferences for mapping gender features are more difficult to acquire.

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“…In the original task, eight items also elicit 1REF (and 1NOM) clitics, entailing a configuration in which the person of the two clitics of the cluster agree in person (je me ''I myself''), and eight items elicit 1ACC clitics, in a configuration in which there is number mismatch (il/elle me ''he/she me''). As Delage et al (2016) have shown (see also Haiden, 2011), morphological features of the clitic cluster influence performance even in TD children, with mismatch increasing the complexity of the required calculation. The original task includes the simpler configurations alongside the more complex ones, whereas Durrlemann and Delage's task includes only the more complex ones.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Pragmatic versus structural difficulties in the production of pronominal clitics in French-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder

Pelletier

Tuller

Zebib

et al. 2018

Autism & Developmental Language Impairments

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Background and aims: Impaired production of third person accusative pronominal clitics is a signature of language impairment in French-speaking children. It has been found to be a prominent and persistent difficulty in children and adolescents with specific language impairment. Previous studies have reported that many children with autism spectrum disorder also have low performance on these clitics. However, it remains unclear whether these difficulties in children with autism spectrum disorder are due to structural language impairment or to pragmatic deficits. This is because pragmatics skills, notoriously weak in children with autism spectrum disorder, are also needed for appropriate use of pronouns. Use of pronouns without clear referents and difficulty with discourse pronouns (first and second person), which require taking into account the point of view of one's interlocutor (perspective shifting), have frequently been reported for autism spectrum disorder. Methods: We elicited production of nominative, reflexive and accusative third and first person pronominal clitics in 19 verbal children with autism spectrum disorder (aged 6-12, high and low functioning, with structural language impairment, or with normal language) and 19 age-matched children with specific language impairment. If pragmatics is behind difficulties on these elements, performance on first-person clitics would be expected to be worse than performance on third person clitics, since it requires perspective shifting. Furthermore, worse performance for first person clitics was expected in the children with autism spectrum disorder compared to the children with specific language impairment, since weak pragmatics is an integral part of impairment in the former, but not in the latter. More generally, different error patterns would be expected in the two groups, if the source of difficulty with clitics is different (a pragmatic deficit vs. a structural language deficit). Results: Similar patterns of relative difficulties were found in the autism spectrum disorder language impairment and specific language impairment groups, with third person accusative clitics being produced at lower rates than first-person pronouns and error patterns being essentially identical. First-person pronouns did not pose particular difficulties in the children with autism spectrum disorder (language impairment or normal language) with respect to third-person pronouns or to the children with specific language impairment. Performance was not related to nonverbal intelligence in the autism spectrum disorder group. Conclusions: The elicitation task used in this study included explicit instruction, and focus on perspective shifting (both visual and verbal), allowing for potential pragmatic effects to be controlled. Moreover, the task elicited a variety of types of clitics in morphosyntactic contexts of varying complexity, providing ample opportunities for employment of

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

Cited by 16 publications

References 42 publications

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

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

Typological Differences in Morphological Patterns, Gender Features, and Thematic Structure in the L2 Acquisition of Ashaninka Spanish

Pragmatic versus structural difficulties in the production of pronominal clitics in French-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder

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