Bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment: Similarities and Differences

The aim of this study was to investigate the performance of Early L2 (EL2) children in those areas which are known to be particularly challenging for Italian SLI children, such as the production of direct object clitic pronouns and the repetition of nonwords, which are considered two of the most sensitive clinical markers for SLI in Italian. An experimental protocol was administered to 120 preschool Italian EL2 children and a control group of 40 age-matched monolingual Italian children. Results show that, similarly to SLI children, EL2 learners underperform in comparison to their monolingual peers in the production of clitic pronouns, even though they display a different error pattern: the most frequent error displayed by our EL2 children is producing an incorrect clitic, committing agreement errors, whereas SLI preschool children typically omit the pronoun. For what concerns nonword repetition no significant differences have been found between the two groups. To conclude, our research revealed that EL2 children present a linguistic profile which is qualitatively and quantitatively different from that typically shown by SLI children both in clitic production and in nonword repetition, suggesting the possibility to discriminate properly between the two populations.