Event Abstract Back to Event Pragmatic inference and morphosyntactic abilities in Italian children with SLI: the reason of a discrepancy Maria Teresa Guasti1 and Fabrizio Arosio1* 1 University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy 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. Keywords: SLI, quantifiers, Implicatures, Italian, pragmatics Conference: XPRAG.it Behavioral and Neural Evidence on Pragmatic Processing , Genoa, Italy, 10 Jun - 11 Jun, 2017. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation Topic: Acquisition of pragmatic and mind-reading abilities Citation: Guasti M and Arosio F (2019). Pragmatic inference and morphosyntactic abilities in Italian children with SLI: the reason of a discrepancy. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: XPRAG.it Behavioral and Neural Evidence on Pragmatic Processing . doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2017.71.00002 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 10 May 2017; Published Online: 25 Jan 2019. * Correspondence: PhD. Fabrizio Arosio, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy, fabrizio.arosio@unimib.it Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Maria Teresa Guasti Fabrizio Arosio Google Maria Teresa Guasti Fabrizio Arosio Google Scholar Maria Teresa Guasti Fabrizio Arosio PubMed Maria Teresa Guasti Fabrizio Arosio Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.