Production of third-person direct object clitics in children with cochlear implants speaking Italian.

Production of third-person direct object clitics in children with cochlear implants speaking Italian. Clin Linguist Phon. 2020 Aug 14;:1-15 Authors: Giustolisi B, Guasti MT, Nicastri M, Mancini P, Palma S, Genovese E, Arosio F Abstract Previous research has shown that the production of third-person singular accusative object clitics (3DO clitics) might be taxing in Italian-speaking pre-school children with cochlear implants (CIs). We investigated this topic by assessing 3DO clitic production in 14 children with an average age of 8 years, who had received CI between age 1 and 4. The first goal of the study was to analyze whether school-aged children with CIs exhibit atypical behavior in 3DO clitic production. The second goal was to analyze whether children with CIs are prone to agreement errors in case of gender mismatch between the subject and the 3DO clitic, as has been shown for normal-hearing, typically developing children. To achieve this, we used two tasks in which subject and object clitic grammatical genders were manipulated so that they would or would not match. As for the first goal, the majority of children with CIs had good performance on the clitic tasks. However, some participants' performance was poor. The pattern of deviant responses differed among the poor performers. We believe that children with CIs showing impairments in 3DO clitic production need careful individual analysis in order to plan effective speech thera...
Source: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Clin Linguist Phon Source Type: research