The acquisition of the clitic ci among typically developing Italian preschoolers

Preliminary data

Bibliographic Data

ID21758444
AuthorsAlice Souzzi (Piaggio (Italy)), Gloria Gagliardi (0000-0001-5257-1540, Piaggio (Italy))
Year2022
Volume116
Issue4
Pages77-114
Publication date2022-09-11
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistik Online (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1615-3014 • E-ISSN: 1615-3014
PublisherUniversity of Bern (PUBLISHER • CH)
DOI10.13092/lo.116.8891
OpenAlexW4296424281
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited12

This paper explores the acquisitional patterns of the Italian ci morpheme and its potential role as a clinical marker for Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in Italian-speaking children, taking into account its distributional, sociolinguistic, and typological properties. To this purpose, we (i) administered a test for the elicited production of clitic pronouns in Italian – which we will refer to as “T-PEC” in the following – to 126 school-aged Italian speakers and (ii) developed a novel test focused on the ci morpheme in order to investigate its production by five-year-old typically developing children. The results and their theoretical interpretations are of particular interest since they could shed light on the acquisition of the morpheme, thus helping understand both typical and atypical grammar development. Given the continuity of the two, it could also be applied to the diagnosis and rehabilitation of DLD, which remains a major challenge for child neuropsychiatrists, psychologists, and speech-language therapists

Clitic · Grammar · Linguistics · Morpheme · Language Development and Disorders · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development

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