I pronomi clitici e la diagnosi del Disturbo del Linguaggio in età evolutiva: sull’utilizzo del clitico “ci”

Abstract

According to the scientific literature, the impaired production of third-person clitics represents a signature of Developmental Language Disorder in Italian-speaking children. Building upon previous findings, this paper aims at investigating the potential role of the Italian ci morpheme as a clinical marker for the disorder. To this goal, we developed a novel elicitation test focused on the pronoun to explore its production by five-year-old typically developing children. Our findings, though preliminary, are relevant to shed light i) on the acquisitional patterns of this morpheme and ii) on a methodological issue, namely the difficulty of eliciting non-obligatory elements.