Language Competence in Italian Heritage Speakers: The Contribution of Clitic Pronouns and Nonword Repetition

Abstract

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.

Moving to continuous classifications of bilingualism through machine learning trained on language production

“…bilinguals, particularly when the two languages spoken are a clitic and a non-clitic language (Belletti et al, 2007;Romano, 2020Romano, , 2021Smith et al, 2022). The study by Smith et al (2023) provides the original dataset used also in the current study, found a differential pattern of clitic production across three groups (monolinguals, attriters, heritage speakers) where all types of clitics (one argument, as in 3 above, or clitic clusters) were significantly fewer in attriters compared to monolinguals, and in heritage speakers compared to attriters.…”

“…bilinguals, particularly when the two languages spoken are a clitic and a non-clitic language (Belletti et al, 2007;Romano, 2020Romano, , 2021Smith et al, 2022). The study by Smith et al (2023) provides the original dataset used also in the current study, found a differential pattern of clitic production across three groups (monolinguals, attriters, heritage speakers) where all types of clitics (one argument, as in 3 above, or clitic clusters) were significantly fewer in attriters compared to monolinguals, and in heritage speakers compared to attriters. This phenomenon was interpreted as a by-product of "inter-generational attrition", where only monolinguals retain a strong preference for clitics over any other structure, attriters make use of single clitics but not of clusters and heritage speakers, whose input is provided by attriters, mostly prefer the use of lexical expressions.…”

“…Two different datasets, both including these three different classes of speakers, are used to train and test the SVMs. The first dataset, which we will refer to as "the original dataset", that has been recently published by Smith et al (2023) and a second dataset, which we will refer to as "the novel dataset", that was purposely collected for the current study to ensure that our results are reliable and robust: if the SVM trained on the original dataset can predict well above chance the classes of speakers on a novel dataset, collected using the same stimuli, procedure and task, then results are highly replicable.…”

“…All participants took part in a series of elicitation tasks, which are fully described in Smith et al (2023). In the tasks, participants are prompted to answer a question about an image depicting two characters interacting with each other, and an object.…”

“…In the original dataset (i.e., from Smith et al, 2023) we have a total of 2,688 items, which are divided into 760 (single clitic), 757 (lexical element), 619 (cluster 1st/2nd), 444 (cluster 3rd) and 108 (other). In the novel dataset (i.e., collected specifically for the current study) we have a total of 480 items, divided into 126 (single clitic), 106 (lexical element), 128 (cluster 1st/2nd), 115 (cluster 3rd) and 5 (other).…”