Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as…

Purpose: Extended optional use of direct object clitic pronouns (e.g., "la" in "Paula la vede" ["Paula sees her"]) appears to be a clinical marker for specific language impairment (SLI) in Italian. In this study, we examined whether sentence production demands might influence the degree to which Italian-speaking…

This study aims to describe in detail the linguistic skills of a large group of SLI participants. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of age-related effects on their linguistic performance and to whether a linguistic assessment of a narrative task can capture language impairments that might not be adequately pointed out by standardized…