The Production of Clitic Pronouns: A Study on Bilingual and Monolingual Dyslexic Children

Abstract

Clitic production is reported to be challenging for impaired children, suffering from dyslexia or SLI, and for early second language learners too. On the contrary, research has not directly investigated the relation between dyslexia, bilingualism and clitic production. The aim of our study is that of addressing this topic, by analyzing the performance of 4 groups of children in a clitic elicitation task: 25 Italian monolingual dyslexic children (mean age 10;08 years old), 33 Italian monolingual typically developing children (9;99 years old), 25 bilingual dyslexic children with Italian as L2 (10;31 years old) and 31 bilingual typically developing children with Italian as L2 (10;30 years old). As inclusion criteria, bilingual children had at least 5 years of exposure to Italian, including 3 years of consecutive school attendance in Italy. Clitic production was assessed by means of an elicitation task in which the pronoun had to be produced either in the simple present or in the present perfect; higher difficulties were expected in this last condition, in which the clitic has to agree in gender and number with the past participle. Results revealed that dyslexic children, both monolingual and bilingual, performed worse than controls both in the simple present and in the present perfect, indicating that clitic production is challenging in dyslexia. As for the bilingual children, instead, differences were found between the two tasks. In the simple present, bilingual children performed very accurately and similarly to their monolingual peers, indicating that a target performance with clitics is accomplished by typically developing children with a longer exposure to Italian and suggesting that previously reported difficulties were related to linguistic immaturity and are likely to disappear as their L2 exposure and competence grow. In the present perfect, instead, both groups of bilinguals performed worse than their monolingual peers, suggesting that bilingualism could exacerbate the difficulties in the most challenging condition. Importantly, however, no negative effect of bilingualism in clitic production was found once controlling for the subjects' vocabulary, evidencing the importance of lexical competence in the target language for a native-like performance in clitic production.

Phonological Awareness across Child Populations: How Bilingualism and Dyslexia Interact

“…This warrants an important indication for all parents, educators and health professionals that worry about possible negative effects of bilingualism in dyslexia: the data of this study, in line with what is reported by other research in different linguistic domains (Vender et al 2018a(Vender et al , 2018b(Vender et al , 2020(Vender et al , 2021, indicate that being bilingual does not exacerbate the difficulties at the core of dyslexia, but it could on the contrary be even beneficial for the many advantages that it can bring at the linguistic, cognitive and cultural level.…”

How do bilingual dyslexic and typically developing children perform in nonword repetition? Evidence from a study on Italian L2 children

“…Only a few studies have considered the relationship between these two dimensions and never in relation to nonword repetition. The limited evidence available suggests that bilingual and monolingual dyslexic children display similar morphosyntactic deficits, as in clitic production (Vender, Hu, Mantione, Delfitto & Melloni, 2018), whereas bilingual dyslexics could even outperform their monolingual peers in tasks assessing morphological competence and requiring good metalinguistic skills, as in nonword pluralization (Vender, Hu, Mantione, Savazzi, Delfitto & Melloni, 2018), and in tasks assessing their nonverbal implicit learning and executive functions (see Vender, Krivochen, Phillips, Saddy & Delfitto, 2019, for a modified version of the Simon Task). Since no study has focused on the interaction between bilingualism and dyslexia in nonword repetition, providing an answer to this research question is certainly an important element of novelty of this paper.…”

Implicit Learning, Bilingualism, and Dyslexia: Insights From a Study Assessing AGL With a Modified Simon Task

“…However, a sparse number of studies has explored the interaction between bilingualism and atypical development, in order to investigate whether these advantages extend also to individuals suffering from specific impairments such as developmental dyslexia 1 . This would have a crucial social impact, since parents and teachers of impaired children often fear that bilingualism could negatively affect their linguistic development and could thus decide that one of the languages should be abandoned (Vender et al, 2018a; Garaffa et al, 2019).…”