The Lack of Omission of Clitics in Greek Children with SLI: An Experimental Study

Abstract

Object clitics are not uniformly acquired across languages; French-, Italian, Catalan- speaking TD children show late acquisition of clitics, omission and a preference for using full DPs in contrast to Spanish-, Romanian- and Greek-speaking ones. This variation has been explained through the Optional Clitic stage (Wexler 2003), which results from the interaction of a universal developmental constraint, the Unique Checking Constraint (Wexler, 2000), with syntactic properties of particular languages. Given that children with SLI follow the same but delayed path to language acquisition as their TD peers (Rice et al., 1995), they are subject to UCC for a prolonged period (Wexler 2003). The results of our elicitation task, the first experimental test of clitic omission in Greek SLI, show ceiling performance in clitic production and give support to UCC and theories in which the impairment lies in the computational system rather than in a phonological deficit.