The Determiner System in a Group of Italian Children With SLI

Domain-General Versus Domain-Specific Accounts of Specific Language Impairment: Evidence From Bilingual Children's Acquisition of Object Pronouns

“…French-speaking children with SLI are less accurate than TD mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched younger children in producing object clitics, and they have comparatively less difficulty producing definite articles than object clitics even though the definite articles le, la, and les are homophonous with third-person direct object clitics (Hamann (2004), Jakubowicz et al (1998), Le Normand, Leonard, and McGregor (1993), Paradis (2004), Paradis and Crago (2004)). By contrast, Italian-speaking children with SLI display difficulties with both clitics and definite articles (Bortolini et al (1997;, Bottari et al (1998;, Leonard et al (1992)); however, we base our predictions for French-English bilinguals on prior monolingual findings for French and discuss the Italian-French differences in section 4.3.…”

“…The bilingual children displayed similar and high accuracy between their languages in the use of articles. This comparison shows that the difficulty children with SLI experience with respect to object clitics is not easily reducible to perceptual salience (see also Bottari et al (1998), Jakubowicz et al (1998)), contrary to the assumptions of the GSH/SH account, and therefore more likely resides in the linguistic domain, as predicted by the DD/EUCC. 6 From Tomasello's (2003) domain-general Constructivist/Usage-based theory, an additional difficulty object clitics pose for learners that definite articles do not could be the distributional variation associated with direct objects in French.…”

“…In contrast to domain-general approaches like GSH/SH, other accounts have hypothesized that specific deficits in linguistic representation are an etiological component of SLI (Bottari, Cipriani, Chilosi, and Pfanner (1998;, Clahsen, Bartke, and Göllner (1997), Jakubowicz and Nash (2001), Rice (2003), Rice and Wexler (1996), van der Lely (2003), Wexler (2003;in press)). Domain-specific accounts are able to explain certain patterns in morphosyntactic acquisition in children with SLI that are difficult to explain on the assumption that the sole deficits affected children possess are in general cognitive/perceptual mechanisms whose impact can be construed as global or "across-the-board."…”

“…Children with SLI have pronounced difficulties when compared to TD children in accurately producing object clitics in both Italian (Bortolini, Caselli, Deevy, and Leonard (2002), Bottari et al (1998;, Leonard et al (1992)) and Spanish (Bedore and Leonard (2001), Bosch and Serra (1997), De la Mora, Paradis, Grinstead, Flores, and Cantu (2004), Jacobson and Schwartz (2002); but see Wexler, Gavarró, and Torrens (2004)). With respect to French, the use of object clitics is relatively late in the language production of TD monolingual and bilingual children; they emerge later than subject and reflexive clitics, between the ages of 2;6 and 3;0, and object omissions are the most common errors in contexts where pronominalization is felicitous (Chillier et al (2001), Clark (1985), Granfeldt and Schlyter (2004), Hamann, Rizzi, and Frauenfelder (1996), Hulk (2000), Jakubowicz, Müller, Kang, Riemer, and Rigaut (1996), Jakubowicz and Rigaut (2000), Kaiser (1994)).…”

“…However, Wexler (1998; has not presented empirical findings or straightforward predictions for how such a stage would result in omission of determiners, whereas he has explicitly predicted the omission of object clitics. See also Jakubowicz et al (1998) and Bottari et al (1998; for discussion of how computational complexity (defined by movement) involved in the control of Det is possibly less than it is for other functional categories.…”