Clitic pronoun production as a measure of atypical language development in French

Abstract

Three aspects of accusative clitic production, which is frequently proposed as a particularly pertinent marker of immature or impaired language in French, are explored: (1) the status of this marker after childhood in atypical language development, (2) the performance of typically-developing children after early childhood, and (3) the specificity of third person accusative clitics. These three points were examined via results on an elicited production probe administered to 36 typically-developing 6- and 11-years-olds, and to 71 adolescents whose language has developed since childhood in the context of pathologies associated with varying degrees of severity for language development: SLI, mild-to-moderate hearing loss, and Rolandic Epilepsy. It was found that accusative clitic production remained weak long after childhood in adolescents whose language developed atypically, no matter what the cause of the atypical development was and no matter how severe its effects on language are, and that this low production concerned particularly or exclusively third person accusative clitics. Moreover, a strong age-effect was found between the TD 6- and 11-year-olds, for accusative clitic production. These results are interpreted as providing evidence that difficulty with third person accusative clitics stems from non-optimal functioning of extra-linguistic systems which are sensitive to the complexity of linguistic operations.