How early L2 children perform on Italian clinical markers of SLI: A study of clitic production and nonword repetition

Abstract

Early second language (EL2) learners generally perform more poorly than monolinguals in specific language domains, presenting similarities with children affected by specific language impairment (SLI). As a consequence, it can be difficult to correctly diagnose this disorder in EL2 children. The current study investigated the performance of 120 EL2 and 40 age-matched monolingual children in object clitic production and nonword repetition, which are two sensitive clinical markers of SLI in Italian. Results show that EL2 children underperform in comparison to monolinguals in the clitic task. However, in contrast to what is reported on Italian-speaking children with SLI, EL2 children tend not to omit clitics but instead produce the incorrect form, committing agreement errors. No differences are found between EL2 and monolingual children on nonword repetition. These results suggest that, at least in Italian, EL2 children only superficially resemble children with SLI and, on closer inspection, present a qualitatively and quantitatively different linguistic profile.

Is Morphological Awareness a Relevant Predictor of Reading Fluency and Comprehension? New Evidence From Italian Monolingual and Arabic-Italian Bilingual Children

“…Note that such finding is in line with previous research based on early L2 Italian pre-school children, which showed a performance on non-word repetition comparable to their monolingual peers. By contrast, their ability in other tasks of morpho-syntactic knowledge appeared significantly lower with respect to monolinguals, though not directly comparable to that of SLI children (Vender et al, 2016).…”

Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters

“…In this sense, the results put forward by Vender et al (2016) suggest that monolingual and EL2 children's profiles in clitic production differ in quantitative and qualitative terms. Although EL2 children underperformed the monolinguals, producing a lower number of clitics, they did not omit the pronoun (which constitutes the typical behavior of SLI children), but produced an incorrect (wrongly inflected) clitic instead.…”

“…More recently, (Vender et al 2016) administered a clitic elicitation task to 120 preschool EL2 children that were exposed to Italian as their L2 (3.5 years in average) and were speaking Albanian, Arabic, or Romanian as their first language, and compared their performance to that of 40 monolingual Italian children. The authors aimed not only to compare monolingual and EL2 children in clitic production, but also to evaluate the role of exposure to Italian, as well as competence in the L2, as predictors of the performance in the task.…”

“…Clitic production is considered a good clinical marker for Italian monolingual children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI) (Bortolini et al 2006). Moreover, this task is reported to be particularly challenging for early second language children (EL2), who are less accurate than their peers in this task (Vender et al 2016). Even though the typology of errors committed by the two populations (non-impaired bilinguals and SLI children) is generally different, it can be difficult to keep them apart from each other and, as a consequence, to identify a language impairment in bilingual children.…”

“…Beyond vocabulary and lexical access, one of the areas that is most vulnerable is the comprehension and especially the production of structures that are complex from the morphosyntactic point of view (Bialystok 2009;Sorace et al 2009;Vender et al 2016). For this reason, the production of clitic pronouns, which requires a quite sophisticated linguistic competence, has been found to be problematic in early second language learners acquiring different Romance languages, including Italian, as will be reviewed in the following section.…”