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Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have been shown to struggle with the acquisition of complex structures requiring structural embedding and movement of a sentential element from its original position. This study examines the production of subject and object relative clauses (RCs) by Italian children, investigating whether: i) seven-year-old children with DLD are impaired in embedding or movement operations; ii) specific factors, such as animacy of the arguments, affect the production of sentences with movement and embedding, iii) the linguistic profile of children with DLD is qualitatively different from that of typically developing (TD) children. We elicited the production of RCs with animate and inanimate arguments in 12 Italian-speaking children with DLD (mean age = 7;2) and in two TD control groups: age matched (AM) and language matched (LM). Children with DLD produced fewer RCs than either control group and made different errors, showing a slightly different developmental path. Animacy mismatch did not improve RC production in any group. Results suggest that seven-year-old children with DLD are in a transitional stage: they can use embedding but still have difficulties with movement operations, especially in object RCs. This indicates that the language competence of children with DLD improves with age, but long-distance dependencies continue to be challenging.

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) affects children’s comprehension and production of spoken language without any known biomedical condition. The importance of early identification of DLD is widely acknowledged. Several studies have explored DLD predictors to identify children needing further diagnostic investigation. Most of these measures might be problematic for young children and bilingual children. Based on literature reporting fragile rhythmic abilities in children with DLD, in our study, we followed a different approach. We explored how non-linguistic measures of rhythmic anticipation can be gathered by means of advanced information technology and used to identify children at risk of DLD. With this aim, we developed MARS, a web-based tool to collect such data in a playful way and to analyze them using Machine Learning. MARS engages children in rhythmic babbling exercises, records their vocal productions, and analyzes the recordings. We discuss the methodological rationale of MARS and its underlying technology, and we describe a preliminary study with N = 47 children with and without DLD. The analysis of the audio features of participants’ rhythmic vocal productions highlights different patterns in the two groups. This result, although preliminary, suggests that MARS could be a valuable tool for early DLD assessment.

Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) have impaired morphosyntactic abilities despite age-appropriate nonverbal cognitive abilities and no hearing disorders or brain injury. The persistent omission of third-person object clitic pronouns (3DO clitics) has been proven to be a clinical marker of developmental language disorders (DLD) for both preschool and school-aged Italian-speaking children. According to the model of 3DO clitic derivation recently brought to attention, 3DO clitic omission is a morphosyntactic matter and, therefore, we argue that the production of 3DO clitics can be enhanced through morphosyntactic priming in children with DLD. To corroborate this hypothesis, we administered a 3DO clitic training based on a morphosyntactic priming paradigm to 23 typically developing (TD) children and 11 children with DLD. Results show that their 3DO clitic production is enhanced after the training and that these effects are persistent in time. Our results suggest that a priming-based training can concretely help children with DLD in their language development.

A large number of children worldwide are only exposed to their L2 around 3 years of age and can exhibit linguistic behaviours that resemble those of a child with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). This can lead to under- or over-identification of DLD in this population. This study endeavors to contribute to overcoming this problem, by determining whether two specific clinical markers used with the Italian monolingual population can also be used with early L2 acquiring children, namely clitic production and non-word repetition. Our study involved two groups of 5-year-old L2 learners of Italian from various language backgrounds; 18 children had been referred to Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) services (EL2_DLD), and 30 children were typically developing (EL2_TD). The participants completed an Italian clitic production task and a non-word repetition task based on Italian phonotactics. Data was also collected from the participants’ caregivers with the ALDeQ Parental Questionnaire to obtain information about the children’s L1. Our results suggest that non-word repetition and clitic production in Italian are potentially useful for identifying L2 learners of Italian with DLD, at the age of 5 years. The repetition of non-words is highly accurate in identifying children with DLD among the participants, while clitic production is somewhat less discriminative in this sample. This study is a first step towards uncovering clinical markers that could be used to determine the presence of DLD in children acquiring their L2.

Previous research has shown that the production of third-person singular accusative object clitics (3DO clitics) might be taxing in Italian-speaking pre-school children with cochlear implants (CIs). We investigated this topic by assessing 3DO clitic production in 14 children with an average age of 8 years, who had received CI between age 1 and 4. The first goal of the study was to analyze whether school-aged children with CIs exhibit atypical behavior in 3DO clitic production. The second goal was to analyze whether children with CIs are prone to agreement errors in case of gender mismatch between the subject and the 3DO clitic, as has been shown for normal-hearing, typically developing children. To achieve this, we used two tasks in which subject and object clitic grammatical genders were manipulated so that they would or would not match. As for the first goal, the majority of children with CIs had good performance on the clitic tasks. However, some participants’ performance was poor. The pattern of deviant responses differed among the poor performers. We believe that children with CIs showing impairments in 3DO clitic production need careful individual analysis in order to plan effective speech therapy. As for the second goal, children with CIs were more prone to agreement errors in the mismatch condition compared to the match condition; this dimension needs to be considered when assessing and eventually rehabilitating clitic production.

In the last years, researchers and therapists have pinpointed a number of critical aspects in current speech-language interventions. Several studies have explored the use of technology to overcome these barriers and to support speech-therapy in children with language impairments (e.g. DLD and ASD). In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for designing linguistic activities (for assessment and training), based on advances in psycholinguistics. Moving from this theoretical framework, we identified a development process - from the UX design to coding of activities - which is based on a novel set of Design Patterns at multiple layers of abstraction. We then put this framework into practice by implementing these patterns into two technological solutions - tablet and robots - and performing an empirical study to evaluate their benefits. Our results, although still preliminary since they assessed only a tablet experimental condition, are promising for extending the identified Design Patterns to other technological solutions.

The present study used a visual world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate online processing of grammatical gender and number in Mandarin-Italian bilingual children, in comparison to monolingual Italian children. We examined how children anticipated upcoming nouns on the basis of grammatical gender and number information on the preceding article. While monolingual speakers are able to employ such predictive mechanisms from a very young age, to our knowledge, this is the first study that compares gender and number processing in bilingual children. The results show that, overall, participants made linguistic predictions on the basis of articles, although a post-hoc analysis focusing on a subset of our bilingual participants did not confirm the prediction effect in Mandarin-Italian bilingual children. We found a greater difference in the bilingual group than in the monolingual group, in that bilinguals tended to be slower when processing gender than number. Finally, we found that L2 proficiency had a significant effect on gender processing in the bilingual group. One interpretation of these findings is that the discrepancy between gender and number may be due to transfer, since Mandarin does not have grammatical gender while it does have a conceptual notion of number. Another factor may be L2 proficiency, and especially lexical knowledge, since gender is an arbitrary property stored in the lexicon, while number is concretely linked to the referential context.

Linguistic skills are the building blocks of one of the most resourceful abilities of human beings: communication. Compromised linguistic skills significantly reduce the understanding or exchanging of meaningful messages and information. Children with difficulties in this area are often enrolled in extensive speech therapy programs and, nowadays, such issues affect also bilingual children with a migrant background, impacting their quality of life. Our research explores a Tangible User Interface developed on a new paradigm we postulated called "Embodied Argument Movement". In this paper, we present Moovy, an engaging table-top game for rehabilitating challenging morphosyntactic constructs and improving language skills. We performed two pilot studies with 13 children; one to test the User Experience and the other to assess Moovy's efficacy and the paradigm soundness. Preliminary results suggest that Moovy could make a difference in speech-therapies programs, fostering children to continue their therapy willingly and successfully.

Italian speaking typically developing children optionally omit third person direct object clitics (3DO) until at least age 4 years. In a set of two studies, we investigated whether clitic omissions depend on intervention phenomena. We discussed a model of syntactic intervention in 3DO clitic production in which the subject of a sentence might intervene in clitic production at an intermediate stage of the sentence derivation, when the clitic moves from its initial merging position to a higher position above the subject. We argued that omissions and errors in 3DO clitic productions arise when retrieving from memory the clitic to achieve an agreement relation in a context of syntactic intervention. We argued that working memory limitations impact on the clitic retrieving operation cued by lexical and representational features. In Study 1, we elicited the production of third singular clitics in sentences with a full lexical subject. The third singular subject and the third singular clitic were matched or not in gender. Results of Study 1 showed that when there is a gender feature mismatch between the subject and the 3DO clitic children optionally make clitic gender errors or even replace the 3DO clitic with a post-verbal full DP. We argued that these results could be explained in an intervention model in which the external verb lexical argument (the lexical subject) is erroneously retrieved for achieving the agreement operation involving the movement of the clitic to its surface position. In Study 2 we investigated whether the problems in clitic production found in Study 1 depend on phonological priming or structural intervention. We elicited the production of third singular clitics in sentences with a silent pro subject. As in Study 1, the third singular subject and the third singular clitic were matched or not in gender. Results of Study 2 showed that in sentences with a mismatch in gender features between the null subject and the clitic, children tend to produce a cl

We aim at determining whether 7-year-old Italian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI): (1) have problems with the production of wh- questions; (2) display a subject/object asymmetry in producing which- and who questions; (3) attempt to simplify questions, especially which- questions; (4) have difficulties with movement and verbal agreement in wh- questions. We elicited subject and object who and which NP questions in 10 children with SLI (M = 7;2), in 10 chronological age (CA)-matched controls (M = 7;2) and 10 language-matched controls (M = 5;2). Results showed that (1) children with SLI produced fewer questions than both control groups; (2) a subject/object asymmetry was observed in who questions but not in which NP questions; (3) which NP questions were more problematic than who questions; (4) children with SLI produced more agreement errors and resorted to simplification strategies to avoid wh- question production. Results point to a grammatical deficit due to the computation of complex grammatical relations and suggest that there is a misalignment among pieces of linguistic competence needed to form Italian wh- questions (wh- movement and agreement computation). Outcomes have implications for clinical assessment recommending the production of wh- questions to be considered in the evaluation of SLI in Italian

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) have problems comprehending relative clauses (RCs) and find object RCs more difficult than subject RCs, as do typically developing children. Few studies have compared these groups directly, leaving it unclear whether the problems observed in children with DD are similar to those described in SLI. Work with typically developing children has shown that the comprehension of passive RCs is less challenging than that of object RCs. It is argued that this asymmetry depends on intervention effects as modelized in a Relativized Minimality framework. Since movement is challenging for children with SLI and those with DD, examining and comparing their comprehension of object RCs and passive RCs can broaden our understanding of their language deficits. In fact, both structures involve movement, but the moved element and the movement configuration are different. In our study we investigated the comprehension of subject RCs, object RCs and passive RCs in 12 Italian monolingual children with SLI (mean age: 7;6), 13 Italian monolingual children with DD (mean age: 10;7) and 50 typically developing controls matched for age, grammar and vocabulary. Results from a picture selection task show that: (i) subject RCs are unproblematic for all children; (ii) object RCs are challenging for children with SLI, children with DD and younger typically developing controls; (iii) passive RCs are better understood than object RCs in all groups, but still problematic for children with SLI and younger typically developing controls. Our data show that intervention effects are found in children with SLI and children with DD and that those with SLI have a deficit in transferring thematic roles to moved elements. Our results point out that some of the children with DD have a mild grammatical deficit that was undetected or escaped standardized tests

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a heterogeneous disorder affecting various aspects of language. While most studies have investigated impairments in the domain of syntax and morphosyntax, little is known about compositional semantics and the process of deriving pragmatic meanings in SLI. We selected a group of sixteen monolingual Italian-speaking children with SLI (mean-age 7;4) with a severe morphosyntactic deficit at the receptive and expressive level. We tested their comprehension of quantified sentences including all and some in order to establish whether they were competent with the logical and pragmatic meanings of these quantifiers. Children performed as well as their typically developing controls in understanding logical meanings. In comprehending pragmatic meanings, they obtained lower scores than age-matched controls but they were not different from language-matched children. However, differences in this ability correlated positively with age and with the ability to understand simple sentences in the SLI group. This suggests that aspects of the syntactic component might be involved in the development of this ability and that, despite their severe morphosyntactic deficits, children with SLI might catch up with their peers in deriving pragmatic meanings

The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 different languages, and 7 language (sub-)families. The study investigated the effects of two factors on question formation: (a) whether the question contains a simple interrogative word like 'who' or a complex one like 'which princess', and (b) whether the question word was related to the sentential subject or object position of the verb. The findings show that there is considerable variation among languages, but the two factors mentioned consistently affect children's performance. The cross-linguistic variation shows that three linguistic factors facilitate children's understanding of questions: having overt case morphology, having a single lexical item for both 'who' and 'which', and the use of synthetic verbal forms.

Third-person direct object (DO) clitic pronoun production is examined through an elicited production method in pre-school– and primary school–aged groups of Italian children with specific language impairment (SLI) to establish whether there is an improvement from age 5 years to age 7 years and whether there are qualitative differences in the two groups’ responses. It was found that 5- and 7-year-old Italian children with SLI produce fewer third-person DO clitics than same-age peers. The kind of responses they provide changes: at 5 years, children with SLI tend to omit clitics, while at 7 years, they use a full noun. Production of third-person DO clitics is a persistent challenge for children with SLI and is confirmed to be a good clinical marker both at 5 and 7 years of age.

The study investigated morphosyntactic abilities and semantic-pragmatic competence in 24 children with developmental dyslexia aged 7 -12 years. Morphosyntactic abilities were investgated in a direct object clitic production task, semantic-pragmatic competence in a quantifier comprehension task. Children with dyslexia produced fewer clitics than their age controls and vocabulary controls. Ten children with dyslexia scored less than 1.5 SD below the mean score of an additional group of 89 children of the same age, selected across a range of oral and reading abilities. No difference was found in quantifier comprehension. These findings suggest that a large number of children with dyslexia are likely to be affected by SLI, although not diagnosed, and the authors recommend language assessment, including assessment of clitic production, when children are referred for dyslexia. By capitalizing on theories that see SLI as a deficit in the processing of complex aspects of linguistic relations, the authors argue that the production of clitics is particularly challenging because of their syntactic and morphosyntactic complexity.

In interpreting narratives the most essential information to be extracted is who did what where, when, and why, the classic journalistic imperatives. The ‘who’ and ‘what’ information is usually expressed overtly, and this has made it possible to apply stochastic techniques to problems in this domain (such as word-sense classification and argument structure mapping). The ‘when’ and ‘where’ information is, however, often left implicit, or, at least, only partially specified. The ‘why’ information is rarely explicit. Formal semantic theories of temporal interpretation (e.g. Kamp and Reyle 1993, Ogihara 1996, Abusch 1997) have been quite successful at specifying the contribution that such overt markers as tenses and temporal adverbials make to the meaning of a sentence or discourse.

Language acquisition

We administrated a clitic elicitation task to 16 school-aged Italian speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) in order to investigated whether the failure to produce third person direct object clitics (DO clitics) is a persistent clinical marker of SLI in Italian; we examined whether this failure also extends to reflexive clitics. Results show that Italian children with SLI aged 6 to 9;11 years fail to produce DO clitics and tend to produce a lexical noun introduced by a determiner (full DP) in the argument postverbal position instead of the pronoun; the production of reflexive clitics is preserved in the same population. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses and computation of likelihood ratios show that the failure to produce DO clitics is a persistent good clinical marker of SLI in Italian. We argue that DO clitic production requires complex morphosyntactic operations that are hardly achieved by children with SLI; our findings are compatible with theories considering SLI as a deficit of processing complex linguistic relations.

Summary. Ninenteen children (5-9 years old) diagnosed with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) were administered a screening test consisting of a sentence repetition and a non-word repetition task that is currently under standardization. This test is an adaptation to Italian of an English test (GAPS; Gardner, Froud, McClelland e Van der Lely, 2006)) and taps morphosyntactic and phonological dimensions that are clinical markers of SLI in Italian. SLI children performed poorly in both tasks as compared to three control groups: an age-matched controls, and two verbal-age matched groups (matched for morpho-syntactic and lexical comprehension, respectively). The sensitivity and the specificity of both tests indicated that each task and the combined score of both of them permit to correctly identify children with SLI from typically developing children.

In this paper, we aim at exploring the subject/object asymmetry by comparing the production of relative clauses by two groups of Italian children aged 5 and 9 years respectively. By focusing on quite different ages, we aim at providing some additional information about the development of object relative clauses. We will do so by using a different experimental set up than the one used in Belletti and Contemori (2010) and this might be the source of different outcomes and be revealing of some additional factor promoting the production of object relative clauses endowed with peculiar features. In most studies, subject and object relatives include reversible verbs with two animate arguments. Animacy has been claimed to play a role in the comprehension of object relative clauses by children (Arosio et al. 2011). In this study, we examine whether it also plays a role in production

We investigated the processing of agreement marking and case marking in the comprehension of German relative clauses in 48 seven-year-old monolingual German-speaking children in a picture selection task. We examined the relation between the effectiveness of these different morphological cues and individual memory resources as measured by a digit-span test. Relative clauses were disambiguated either by agreement marking on the embedded verb or by case marking on the embedded determiner phrase. The results show that subject-extracted relative clauses (subject RCs) are more easily comprehended than object-extracted relative clauses (object RCs) and that case disambiguation is more effective than agreement disambiguation. Moreover, we found a relation between individual phonological short-term memory and the effectiveness of the different disambiguating cues in the comprehension of object RCs but not in the comprehension of subject RCs. We found that: (i) children with a low-digit span score have difficulties in the comprehension of case and agreement disambiguated object RCs, (ii) children with a medium-digit span score have difficulties in the comprehension of agreement disambiguated object RCs but not difficulties with case disambiguated object RCs, and (iii) children with a larger digit span score have no difficulties in the comprehension of agreement and case disambiguated object RCs. We explain our results under the Diagnosis and Repair Model (Fodor & Inoue, 2000) by arguing that children by age 7 have adult-like competence and processing strategies for these structures and that observable differences depend on individual memory resources as measured by a digit span task.

This study addresses the question of how the cross-linguistic differences between Greek and Italian impact the comprehension of relative clauses by typically developing children. Specifically, we tested the effect of overt morphological case marking on the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses by children in Greek and in Italian in a crosslinguistic perspective. We did this by carrying out two comprehension experiments. In the first, we compared the comprehension of relative clauses in Greek and Italian. To obtain comparable data, we neutralized case marking in Greek DPs, and we achieved the distinction between subject and object relatives through number agreement on the embedded verb in both languages. In the second experiment, performed only with Greek children, we employed overt case marking on DPs. The results indicate that in the absence of morphological cues the Greek children performed like the Italian ones; the effect of overt case marking contributed significantly to the increase of the Greek children's performance on object relatives. We propose an account in terms of intervention on the dependency between the relative head and its copy (as in Friedmann et al., 2009), and of intervention on the AGREE relation between the agreement node and the subject in the thematic position. This double violation is responsible for the different acquisition path of different types of object relative clauses. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.

We investigate the production of subject and object who and which-questions in the Italian of 4-5 year olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy on the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in Spec vP. We show that different avoidance strategies are attempted by the child to get around this interference, all boiling down to a double checking of agreement: AGREE and Spec-Head. Then, we evaluate our approach from a crosslinguistic perspective and offer an account of the differences observed across early languages. As our account seems to call both for a grammatical and a processing explanation, we end with a critical discussion of this dichotomy.