L’acquisizione dei pronomi clitici nei sordi: evidenze a favore dell’utilità dell’esposizione a coppie minime

The acquisition of clitic pronouns is critical for deaf children: they both start mastering them later than hearing children and keep producing non-standard forms longer (e.g. nominal phrases repetition, wrong clitic morphology and agreement, clitic omission). Here we analyze the written production of three profoundly deaf children elicited during 85 interactive sessions (this roughly corresponds to 85 hours of exercises and free written productions) of the Logogenia method (Radelli 1998). This method crucially uses minimal pairs to bring the attention of the child on the relevant morphosyntactic and semantic oppositions without explicitly offering any grammatical rule. The corpus produced has been transcribed in CHAT format (MacWhinney 2000) and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Both vocabulary enrichment (e.g. Verbal Diversity, Richards 1987) and accuracy improvement trends in clitic production and comprehension are revealed by the analysis of the recorded sessions.