Object Clitic production in monolingual and bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

Abstract Pronominal clitics are sensitive to both morphosyntax and discourse. Problems in clitic use could therefore stem from morphosyntactic or discourse management problems in children with SLI. Previous studies focused on 3rd person clitic use identifying morphosyntactic problems. We compare 1st with 3rd person clitic elicitation by monolingual and bilingual children with SLI to examine whether perspective-switching in the same task would affect performance. Elicited 3rd person clitics were further compared with clitic use in narratives to investigate the role of richer discourse context in clitic production. Perspective-taking was independently examined with first- and second-order Theory of Mind tasks. Bilingual were more accurate than monolingual children with SLI in 1st person clitics, in the use of unambiguous clitics in narratives and in second-order ToM reasoning. We conclude that bilingualism seems to enhance SLI children’s discourse use and perspective-taking strategies which, in turn, improve their use of clitics in context-sensitive conditions.