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On the Acquisition of the Syntax of Romance
Edited by Anna Gavarró
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 62] 2018
► pp. 147–168

Syntactic awareness of clitic pronouns and articles in French-speaking children with autism, specific language impairment and developmental dyslexia

| University of Milano-Bicocca | ARC-CCD Macquarie University
| University of Geneva
| University of Geneva

The performance of 122 children on syntactic awareness of clitics and articles in French was examined. Three clinical groups (21 children with ASD, 22 children with SLI, 23 children with DD) and a group of 56 younger children with TD were studied. On the article task, children with ASD obtained lower scores than all the other groups and on the clitic task they performed worse than children with DD. In addition, children with ASD and low expressive language displayed more difficulty than children with SLI on the clitic task. Thus, a subgroup of children with ASD is taxed in an area that is critical to identify children with SLI.

Keywords: clitics, article, syntactic awareness, ASD, SLI, DD
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Morphosyntax in children with ASD and children with DD
    • 2.1Morphosyntax in children with ASD
    • 2.2Morphosyntax in children with DD
  • 3.Our study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Experimental procedure and materials
      • Syntactic awareness of articles
      • Syntactic awareness of 3rd person direct object clitic pronouns
    • 3.3Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.62.07gua
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