Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters
Abstract
:1. Introduction
1.1. The Production of Clitic Pronouns: Typical Development
1. | Il nonno | la | segue |
The grandfather | CL3S.FEM | follows2 | |
‘The grandfather follows her.’ |
2. | Il nonno | vuole | seguirla |
The grandfather | wants | to follow.CL3SG.FEM | |
‘The grandfather wants to follow her.’ |
3. | Cosa fa il nonno alla bambina? |
‘What does the grandfather do to the girl?’ |
4. | Segue | la | bambina |
pro follows | the | girl | |
‘He follows the girl.’ |
5. | Il nonno | la | ha | seguita |
The grandfather | CL3SG.FEM | has | followPP.3SG.FEM | |
‘The grandfather has followed her.’ |
6. | Il nonno | l’ | ha | seguita |
The grandfather | CL3SG.FEM | has | followPP.3SG.FEM | |
‘The grandfather has followed her.’ |
7. | *Il nonno | l’ | ha | seguite |
The grandfather | CL3PL.FEM | has | followPP.3PL.FEM | |
‘The grandfather has followed them.’ |
1.2. The Production of Clitic Pronouns: Children with Specific Language Impairment
1.3. The Acquisition of Clitics in Early L2 and Bilingual Children
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Participants
2.2. Materials
2.2.1. Preliminary Tasks
Nonverbal intelligence
Reading abilities
Receptive Vocabulary
Phonological Awareness
Morphological Competence
Working Memory
2.2.2. Clitic Elicitation Task
Experimenter: In questa storia ci sono un nonno e una bambina. La bambina esce di casa e il nonno non sa dove va. Il nonno vuole seguire la bambina. Cosa fa il nonno alla bambina? (‘In this story there are a grandfather and a girl. The girl is leaving home and the grandfather doesn’t know where she is going. The grandfather wants to follow the girl. What does the grandfather do to the girl?’)Target answer: La segue. (‘He follows her.’)
Experimenter: Qui ci sono un bambino e una mamma. Il bambino si è sporcato e la mamma è arrabbiata. Il bambino vuole lavarsi. Cosa fa il bambino? (‘In this story there are a little boy and a mother. The little boy is dirty and the mother is upset. The little boy wants to wash himself. What does the little boy do?’)Target answer: Si lava. (‘He washes himself.’).
2.3. Research Questions and Predictions
3. Results
3.1. Preliminary Measures
3.2. Clitic Elicitation Task
4. Discussion
5. Conclusions
Author Contributions
Funding
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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1 | The pronominal system of Italian comprises three classes of pronouns, including strong pronouns, weak pronouns and clitics (Cardinaletti and Starke 1999). Italian clitics can be classified as accusative, dative, genitive, partitive, locative or nominative. This paper focuses only on accusative or Direct Object (DO) clitics (clitics henceforth) which constitute the topic of our study. |
2 | For the glosses, we adopted the following abbreviations: CL: clitic; IndCL: indirect clitic; PP: past participle; FEM: feminine; M: masculine; SG: singular; PL: plural; pro: null pronominal subject. |
3 | In contrast with the movement analysis of clitics, the base generation account proposes that clitics are directly generated in the preverbal position (see Borer 1986 for a survey and references). |
4 | Traditional length of exposure is calculated as the child’s chronological age minus their age at first exposure to the L2, whereas CLE is a composite measure that considers other variables to determine the actual exposure to the L2 over time (amount of language spoken to and by the child with parents and siblings, at school, during holidays, etc., see Unsworth et al. 2012). |
5 | As discussed above, contracted forms like L’ha seguita are widely used in Italian with singular clitics, both masculine and feminine, and therefore we accepted them as target productions. |
6 | Focusing on the acquisition of different agreement configurations by Italian monolingual children, Moscati and Rizzi (2014, p. 79) analyse the derivational complexity of clitic/past participle agreement whereby agreement is checked through a movement chain spanning over two distinct phases, “thus plausibly engaging extra computational resources in terms of operative memory requirements”. |
Mean | Standard Deviation | |
---|---|---|
Age of first exposure (in years) | 2.24 | 1.82 |
Quantity of exposure (in percentage) | 0.64 | 0.10 |
Traditional length of exposure (in years) | 7.96 | 1.98 |
Cumulative length of exposure (in years) | 2.33 | 0.70 |
Monolingual Children | Bilingual Children | |
---|---|---|
No. | 33 | 31 |
Age | 10.0 (1.0) | 10.2 (1.3) |
Raven | 0.47 (0.79) | 0.19 (0.82) |
PPVT-R | 102.70 (20.59) | 95.94 (13.30) |
Word speed | 0.30 (0.64) | 0.25 (0.80) |
Word accuracy | 0.31 (0.85) | 0.03 (0.94) |
Pseudo-words speed | 0.31 (0.62) | 0.63 (0.68) |
Pseudo-words accuracy | 0.17 (0.82) | 0.32 (0.78) |
Text speed | 0.25 (0.38) | 0.14 (0.46) |
Text accuracy | 0.48 (0.70) | 0.26 (0.45) |
Nonword repetition | 0.94 (0.03) | 0.92 (0.95) |
Morphological competence | 0.71 (0.16) | 0.74 (0.20) |
Forward digit span | 29.12 (4.76) | 28.33 (4.22) |
Backward digit span | 13.09 (4.11) | 13.87 (4.69) |
Monolingual Children | Bilingual Children | |
---|---|---|
Simple present | ||
Target | 0.95 (0.14) | 0.94 (0.13) |
Gender/number error | 0.00 (0.01) | 0.01 (0.03) |
Omission | 0.01 (0.02) | 0.01 (0.03) |
Full DP | 0.04 (0.12) | 0.02 (0.05) |
Indirect clitic | 0.00 (0.01) | 0.00 (0.00) |
Other | 0.00 (0.01) | 0.02 (0.09) |
Present Perfect | ||
Target | 0.94 (0.13) | 0.92 (0.13) |
Gender/number error | 0.00 (0.00) | 0.00 (0.01) |
Omission | 0.00 (0.01) | 0.02 (0.09) |
Full DP | 0.04 (0.09) | 0.02 (0.03) |
Indirect clitic | 0.00 (0.01) | 0.00 (0.01) |
Other | 0.01 (0.03) | 0.01 (0.03) |
Non-target PP | 0.00 (0.01) | 0.01 (0.03) |
Wrong contraction | 0.00 (0.01) | 0.00 (0.01) |
Agreement error | 0.01 (0.02) | 0.02 (0.04) |
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Vender, M.; Delfitto, D.; Melloni, C. Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters. Languages 2018, 3, 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages3030022
Vender M, Delfitto D, Melloni C. Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters. Languages. 2018; 3(3):22. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages3030022
Chicago/Turabian StyleVender, Maria, Denis Delfitto, and Chiara Melloni. 2018. "Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters" Languages 3, no. 3: 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages3030022