Purpose: Using two different scoring methods, we examined the diagnostic accuracy of both real-word and nonword repetition in identifying Italian-speaking children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Method: A total of 34 children aged 3;11 to 5;8 participated – 17 children with SLI and 17 typically developing children matched for age (TD-A children). Children completed real-word and nonword repetition tasks. The capacity of real-word and nonword repetition tasks to discriminate children with SLI from TD-A was examined through binary logistic regression and response operating characteristics curves. Results: Both real-word and nonword repetition showed good (or excellent) sensitivity and specificity in distinguishing children with SLI from their typically developing peers. Conclusions: Nonword repetition appears to be a useful diagnostic indicator for Italian, as in other languages. In addition, real-word repetition also holds promise. The contributions of each type of measure are discussed.

Background Although relationships among non-word repetition, real-word repetition and grammatical ability have been documented, it is important to study whether the specific nature of these relationships is tied to the characteristics of a given language. Aims The aim of this study is to explore the potential cross-linguistic differences (Italian and English) in the relationship among non-word repetition, real-word repetition, and grammatical ability in three- and four-year-old children with typical language development. Methods & Procedures To reach this goal, two repetition tasks (one real-word list and one non-word list for each language) were used. In Italian the grammatical categories were the third person plural inflection and the direct-object clitic pronouns, while in English they were the third person singular present tense inflection and the past tense in regular and irregular forms. Outcomes & Results A cross-linguistic comparison showed that in both Italian and English, non-word repetition was a significant predictor of grammatical ability. However, performance on real-word repetition explained children’s grammatical ability in Italian but not in English. Conclusions & Implications Abilities underlying non-word repetition performance (e.g., the processing and/or storage of phonological material) play an important role in the development of children’s grammatical abilities in both languages. Lexical ability (indexed by real-word repetition) showed a close relationship to grammatical ability in Italian but not in English. Implications of the findings are discussed in terms of cross-linguistic differences, genetic research, clinical intervention and methodological issues.

In order to become a proficient user of language, infants must detect temporal cues embedded within the noisy acoustic spectra of ongoing speech by efficient attentional engagement. According to the neuro-constructivist approach, a multi-sensory dysfunction of attentional engagement – hampering the temporal sampling of stimuli – might be responsible for language deficits typically shown in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). In the present study, the efficiency of visual attentional engagement was investigated in 22 children with SLI and 22 typically developing (TD) children by measuring attentional masking (AM). AM refers to impaired identification of the first of two sequentially presented masked objects (O1 and O2) in which the O1-O2 interval was manipulated. Lexical and grammatical comprehension abilities were also tested in both groups. Children with SLI showed a sluggish engagement of temporal attention, and individual differences in AM accounted for a significant percentage of unique variance in grammatical performance. Our results suggest that an attentional engagement deficit – probably linked to a dysfunction of the right fronto-parietal attentional network – might be a contributing factor in these children’s language impairments.

Given the lexical information contained in real words, repetition of such words was a better predictor of grammatical ability than non-word repetition. Future research should replicate and extend these results. Tasks using real words may also have considerable clinical potential; for this reason, these tasks might also be included in studies of children with language impairment.

Purpose Extended optional use of direct object clitic pronouns (e.g., la in Paula la vede “Paula sees her”) appears to be a clinical marker for specific language impairment (SLI) in Italian. In this study, we examined whether sentence production demands might influence the degree to which Italian-speaking children with SLI produced clitics. Method Preschool-age children with SLI (N = 15) and two groups of younger typically developing children (N = 15 each) participated. Production demands were varied through use of a syntactic priming task. Results The children with SLI were more likely than the comparison children to omit the clitic in a control condition in which they had to describe a target picture without the benefit of a preceding sentence prime. The children with SLI were also more likely to describe target pictures using a default clitic or a clitic that had appeared in the preceding prime sentence but was inappropriate for the target. Conclusions The findings suggest that children with SLI have difficulty generating a sentence containing a grammatical slot for a clitic when production demands are increased, and when they succeed in generating such a sentence, they often cannot at the same time retrieve the appropriate clitic form.

Given the lexical information contained in real words, repetition of such words was a better predictor of grammatical ability than non-word repetition. Future research should replicate and extend these results. Tasks using real words may also have considerable clinical potential; for this reason, these tasks might also be included in studies of children with language impairment.

It is argued that in Italian SLI, the grammatical details showing the greatest weakness present phonological/prosodic obstacles as well as grammatical challenges to these children. Consequently, non-word repetition emerges as a predictor of these grammatical weaknesses in SLI, unlike the profile observed in typically developing Italian children.

Non-word (NW) repetition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) is a skill related to, but genetically separate from, grammatical ability. Prosodic structure of the syllables may bridge the gap between these two abilities. A NW repetition task was compared in a group of 15 preschool Italian children with SLI (ranged in age from 3;11 to 5;8) and 15 younger typically developing children (aged from 2;11 to 3;7) matched for mean length of utterance (TD-MLU). Grammatical ability was tested through a probe for direct-object clitic pronouns which is one of the most useful clinical markers in the Italian language. In NW repetition, children with SLI deleted more syllables than the TD-MLU children. The omission of weak syllables in a pre-stress position was a significant predictor of the omission of clitic pronouns. The present study shows that the link between grammar and NW is due to a prosodic characteristic that is more universally challenging in children with SLI.