On the production and omission of dative and accusative clitics in Italian children with learning difficulties

Abstract

This paper investigates the production of third person singular dative (3DAT) and accusative clitic pronouns (3ACC) in Italian children diagnosed with Learning Difficulties (LD), compared to a group of typically developing (TD) age peers (mean age 9;1). Results show that 3DAT clitics are produced in significantly higher percentages than 3ACC clitics by both children with LD and TD children. We claim that for children with LD, the invariable dative clitic gli is easier to retrieve than 3ACC clitics, as suggested for TD school-age children by Cardinaletti et al. (2021) and replicated here. With 3ACC clitics, feature sharing with the extra-clausal antecedent contributes to complexity in addition to the derivation by syntactic movement (Tuller et al., 2011). The two groups also did not differ in the production of DPs and PPs instead of 3ACC and 3DAT clitics, respectively, but children with LD omitted more clitics (both 3ACC and 3DAT) than TD age peers. After removing from the analysis the children who scored more than 1.5 SD below the mean of age-matched controls, as was done in the study by Vender et al. (2018), the performance of the group with LD no longer differed from that of controls. Results suggest that at school age, omission of both 3ACC and 3DAT clitics differentiate typical development from children with LD and oral language difficulties, presumably due to an unrecognized Developmental Language Disorder (Guasti, 2013; Arosio et al., 2016).