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The acquisition of accusative object clitics by IA children from China: Evidence of early age effects?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2013

AUDREY DELCENSERIE  and
FRED GENESEE
AUDREY DELCENSERIE*
Affiliation:
McGill University, Canada
FRED GENESEE
Affiliation:
McGill University, Canada
*
Address for correspondence: Audrey Delcenserie, Department of Psychology, McGill University, Stewart Biology Building, 1205 Dr Penfield Avenue, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 1B1. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The present study compared the performance of twenty-seven French-speaking internationally adopted (IA) children from China to that of twenty-seven monolingual non-adopted French-speaking children (CTL) matched for age, gender, and socioeconomic status on a Clitic Elicitation task. The IA children omitted significantly more accusative object clitics and made significantly more agreement errors using clitics than the CTL children. No other significant differences were found between the groups. The findings suggest that the adoptees may experience difficulties in morphosyntactic development possibly as a result of their delayed exposure to the adopted language.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 196 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[*]

The authors would like to thank Dr Theres Grüter (University of Hawaii at Manoa) for her assistance in designing this study.

References

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