UN COMPITO DI PRODUZIONE ELICITATA PER LA VALUTAZIONE DELL’ITALIANO PARLATO: LE FRASI PASSIVE E LE FRASI ATTIVE CON PRONOME CLITICO

A new elicited production task inducing oral production of actional passive sentences was carried out by school-aged Italian-speaking children with typical development or with Developmental Dyslexia. All children favored active structures with accusative clitic pronouns referring to the patient over passive structures. Oral production of clitic pronouns has been shown to be impaired in Italian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment and/or dyslexia (Bortolini et al., 2006; Arosio et al., 2010; Zachou et al., 2012; Guasti, 2013), while comprehension and production of actional passives do not seem to be particularly problematic in dyslexic children and dyslexic adults, with few exceptions (Reggiani, 2009; Cardinaletti and Volpato, 2011, 2015; Arosio et al. 2013; Franceschini and Volpato 2014 for hearing-impaired children). Accordingly, qualitative differences in clitic production emerge in our study between typically and atypically developing children, while we do not observe any remarkable difference concerning production of passive sentences. The task employed in the experiment allows us to elicit, analyze and compare production of different typologies of pronominal and non pronominal structures and shows how the linguistic field can contribute to the study of (typical and atypical) language acquisition

Elicited production of passive sentences in 6–10 year-old Italian-speaking children

Abstract: In this contribution we investigate the elicited production of passive sentences in Italian children aged 6 to 10. Children were asked to look at a set of drawings and guess what was happening to the patient in each picture (Puppet: “Ora guarda qui, indovina! Cosa succede alla bambina?”, “Now look at this one and guess! What is happening to the girl?”. Target sentence: “La bambina viene/è sgridata”, “The girl is scolded.”). Differently from previous studies on the topic (Volpato, Verin, Cardinaletti, 2012), the agent was partly covered, to prevent the child from using an active sentence containing the agent and an object clitic pronoun referring to the patient. We made use of a specific property of passives, that of allowing the agent to be omitted, when unknown. Results show that the amount of passive sentences slowly increases with age (from 11% to 27%). In all, children produced 21% of passives; they preferred the auxiliary venire over essere, in line with previous findings (Volpato et al., 2012), and chose essere almost exclusively in the present perfect tense (in Italian, the auxiliary venire is impossible in this tense). Despite our task design, children produced active sentences containing a clitic pronoun 65% of times, interpreting the experimenter’s instructions as they had to guess who was the mysterious agent. Moreover, our task induced children to use the indefinite quantifier “someone” as the agent of the active sentence containing the clitic (Qualcuno la sgrida “Someone is scolding her”), (11%), or, more often, a 3rd person plural arbitrary null subject (La sgridano “They are scolding her”), (22%)

UN COMPITO DI PRODUZIONE ELICITATA PER LA VALUTAZIONE DELL’ITALIANO PARLATO: LE FRASI PASSIVE E LE FRASI ATTIVE CON PRONOME CLITICO

A new elicited production task inducing oral production of actional passive sentences was carried out by school-aged Italian-speaking children with typical development or with Developmental Dyslexia. All children favored active structures with accusative clitic pronouns referring to the patient over passive structures. Oral production of clitic pronouns has been shown to be impaired in Italian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment and/or dyslexia (Bortolini et al., 2006; Arosio et al., 2010; Zachou et al., 2012; Guasti, 2013), while comprehension and production of actional passives do not seem to be particularly problematic in dyslexic children and dyslexic adults, with few exceptions (Reggiani, 2009; Cardinaletti and Volpato, 2011, 2015; Arosio et al. 2013; Franceschini and Volpato 2014 for hearing-impaired children). Accordingly, qualitative differences in clitic production emerge in our study between typically and atypically developing children, while we do not observe any remarkable difference concerning production of passive sentences. The task employed in the experiment allows us to elicit, analyze and compare production of different typologies of pronominal and non pronominal structures and shows how the linguistic field can contribute to the study of (typical and atypical) language acquisition

Elicited production of cleft sentences in 6–10 year-old Italian-speaking children

Literature on the acquisition of cleft sentences is still scarce. The acquisition of cleft structures should, however, deserve more attention: they involve the same type of antecedent-gap relation as relative clauses, for which a huge amount of acquisitional data are available, contain cleft constituents, which are typically focalized, and require special discourse conditions to be used. As far as we know, there are no studies on child production of cleft sentences in Italian. In what follows, we report the findings from an elicited production task carried out with school-aged, Italian-speaking children, eliciting subject and object contrastive cleft sentences; these findings are compared with the results from a preference task eliciting relative clauses, run with the same children

The elicited oral production of Italian restrictive relative clauses and cleft sentences in typically developing children and children with developmental dyslexia

We report the findings from an elicited production task carried out with school-aged, Italian-speaking children, eliciting subject (SC) and object (OC) contrastive cleft sentences. These findings are compared with the results from a preference task eliciting relative clauses, run with the same children. We aim at uncovering the strategies employed by Italian-speaking school-aged children and adults when contrasting an agent-subject and a patient-object constituent; in addition, a comparison between the production of cleft and relative clauses is provided within participants. Indeed, by virtue of the syntactic similarities shared by the two constructions, specifically A’ movement of the subject in the subject condition and A’ movement of the object across an embedded subject in the object condition, one would expect participants to perform similarly across the two structures. Children’s accurate performance in the repetition task indicates that Italian-speaking children in their school-age have knowledge of object contrastive cleft sentences. However, OCs were never produced in the elicitation task, differently from SCs

UN COMPITO DI PRODUZIONE ELICITATA PER LA VALUTAZIONE DELL’ITALIANO PARLATO: LE FRASI PASSIVE E LE FRASI ATTIVE CON PRONOME CLITICO

A new elicited production task inducing oral production of actional passive sentences was carried out by school-aged Italian-speaking children with typical development or with Developmental Dyslexia. All children favored active structures with accusative clitic pronouns referring to the patient over passive structures. Oral production of clitic pronouns has been shown to be impaired in Italian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment and/or dyslexia (Bortolini et al., 2006; Arosio et al., 2010; Zachou et al., 2012; Guasti, 2013), while comprehension and production of actional passives do not seem to be particularly problematic in dyslexic children and dyslexic adults, with few exceptions (Reggiani, 2009; Cardinaletti and Volpato, 2011, 2015; Arosio et al. 2013; Franceschini and Volpato 2014 for hearing-impaired children). Accordingly, qualitative differences in clitic production emerge in our study between typically and atypically developing children, while we do not observe any remarkable difference concerning production of passive sentences. The task employed in the experiment allows us to elicit, analyze and compare production of different typologies of pronominal and non pronominal structures and shows how the linguistic field can contribute to the study of (typical and atypical) language acquisition