Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

(joint work with Sara Cerutti and Francesca Volpato)

The aim of the talk is to discuss the asymmetries observed in the acquisition of clitic pronouns: personal vs. reflexive, 1^st/2^nd vs. 3^rd person, accusative vs. nominative, and in particular accusative vs. dative clitics. Accusative and dative clitic pronouns share the syntactic derivation and the type of interpretation, but differ in their morphological make-up: The former diplay gender distinctions, the latter do not (gli is used with both masculine and feminine antecedents). The elicited production of accusative and dative clitics was investigated in Italian school-age children with typical development and with Learning Difficulties. Results show that both groups produced significantly more 3DAT than 3ACC clitic pronouns. Our results are consistent with Tuller et al.’s (2011) hypothesis that difficulties with 3ACC clitics are not only due to their complex syntactic derivation and Delage et al.’s (2016) conclusion that gender marking is most taxing in the acquisition of the pronominal system and may remain so at school age.