Abstract

Cross-linguistic research has shown that children with SLI often omit definite articles and clitic pronouns in their production (e.g. Cipriani et al. 1997; Jakubowicz et al. 1998). For Greek, definite articles and direct object clitics have been suggested to consistute clinical markers for SLI because they are uninterpretable in contrast to indefinite articles which are interpretable (Tsimpli and Stavrakaki 1999). To date, very few studies have investigated SLI children’s sensitivity to omissions of grammatical morphemes during on-line processing (Montgomery and Leonard 1998, 2006). In my talk I will present data from our ongoing project ‘Cross-linguistic study on the production and processing of grammatical morphemes in L2 children compared to children with Specific Language Impairment’. The talk will focus on how 6-to-8 year old Greek children with SLI and age-matched typically developing children process articles and clitics using a self-paced listening task involving grammatical sentences and ungrammatical sentences with omission of definite articles in subject and object position, indefinite articles in object position, and direct object clitic pronouns. The results will be discussed in relation to theories of SLI and the properties of articles and clitics in Greek.