The linguistic profile of bilingual children is known to show areas of overlap with that of children affected by Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), creating a need to differentiate the profiles and provide clinicians with tools to evaluate bilingual speakers in both of their languages. Data from typical adult bilinguals provide a picture of the language of a bilingual speaker at the end of language development. The present work explores how clitic production and nonword repetition (NWR) behave in mature language systems in situations of bilingualism, aiming to provide initial data as a benchmark on Italian as a non-dominant language. Heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian were confronted with adult immigrants (AIs) who moved from Italy to an English-speaking country in adulthood. Clitic pronouns were found to be vulnerable in HSs, who produced approximately 35% of the target clitics against the 80% of Ais, suggesting that clitic pronouns may not be reliable structures to test language competence in heritage Italian. On the other hand, HSs were >97% correct in NWR, suggesting that this paradigm should be explored as a possible marker to test language competence in these populations.
No abstract
The grammar of bilingual children has been shown to be sensitive to linguistic markers for language impairment. These markers can detect similarities and differences between typical bilingual profiles and atypical monolingual profiles in children. In this chapter, we review a study exploring whether the same markers can detect differences in the grammatical patterns of adult bilingual speakers of Italian immersed in an English-speaking environment. Adult immigrants (AI) and heritage speakers (HS) of Italian are bilinguals who are native speakers of a language that is not dominant in their current environment. The study exploits language markers applied to the investigation of language-specific vulnerabilities in Italian children with language impairments, in particular the production of clitic pronouns and the task of sentence repetition. In both tasks, accuracy in HS is significantly worse than that in AI, showing that both linguistic markers are sensitive to a difference between AI and HS grammatical profiles. In sentence repetition both groups show high accuracy; in clitic production HS are considerably more affected than AI. Qualitatively, the markers show similarities, with most produced sentences being grammatically licit in both groups, but also important differences, with HS showing a selective and more severe disadvantage in the use of functional words modifying sentence structure (complementisers, clitics).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.