Object Clitics in Cypriot Greek Children With Sli: Sciencedirect

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Lingua xxx (2014) xxx--xxx
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Object clitics in Cypriot Greek children with SLI

Eleni Theodorou *, Kleanthes K. Grohmann
University of Cyprus
Received 23 April 2013; received in revised form 20 June 2014; accepted 30 November 2014
Abstract
This study investigates the production and placement of direct object clitic pronouns in children with specific language impairment
(SLI). A total of 38 bilectal children were divided into four groups: two groups of children with SLI and two groups of age-matched typically
developing children; 5-year-olds in the younger and 7-year-olds in the older groups. The goals of the study were (i) to investigate whether
object clitics could serve as a clinical marker for Cypriot Greek-speaking children with SLI, (ii) to explore whether there are any
quantitative and/or qualitative differences between typical language development and SLI, and (iii) to determine possible differences
between the age groups. The design of the experiment aimed to shed some light on the question whether children with SLI exhibit
difficulties with clitic production in the context assessed. The results reported here do not support the cross-linguistic finding that clitic
production could serve as a clinical marker for SLI in Cypriot Greek. However, what seems to be at stake is clitic (mis)placement, and the
findings provide some evidence that there is more than meets the eye concerning the theoretical discussion around the use of clitics in
Greek Cypriot children’s language development.
© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: (Discrete) Bilectalism; Clitic placement; Diglossia; Elicitation production; Socio-syntax of development hypothesis; Specific
language impairment (SLI)
1. Introduction
Evidence shows that children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit considerable limitations in their
acquisition of (morpho)syntax, which has been extensively investigated across many languages since Leonard (1998), for
example. While these difficulties depend, of course, to a great extent on the actual language being acquired, one such
vulnerable area is binding at large (see Chien and Wexler, 1990 for early discussion)---and the production of pronominal
forms in particular (Schaeffer, 1997; Bedore and Leonard, 2001). In addition, for so-called ‘clitic-languages’, the latter
means also the production of pronominal clitics, especially direct-object clitics (for a recent overview, see e.g. Varlokosta
et al., under review).
In fact, clitics have been argued to constitute a clinical marker for SLI in some languages, such as French (Jakubowicz
et al., 1998), Italian (Bortolini et al., 2002), and Catalan (Gavarró, 2012), for which research has shown that affected
children tend to omit clitics in the same way younger typically developing children do. In this sense, omissions could be
viewed as a sign for language-impaired development. Difficulties in clitic acquisition by children with SLI were reported in
the literature for several other languages, such as European Portuguese (Costa and Lobo, 2007), French (Friedemann,
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +357 25390706.

E-mail addresses: etheod01@ucy.ac.cy (E. Theodorou), kleanthi@ucy.ac.cy (K.K. Grohmann).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.11.011
0024-3841/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Theodorou, E., Grohmann, K.K., Object clitics in Cypriot Greek children with SLI.
Lingua (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.11.011
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2 E. Theodorou, K.K. Grohmann / Lingua xxx (2014) xxx--xxx
1993/1994; Hamann et al., 1996), Italian (Guasti, 1993/1994; Schaeffer, 1997), Serbo-Croatian (Ilic and Ud Deen, 2004),
and Spanish (Montrul, 2004). However, evidence on clitic production in Greek-speaking children with SLI has not been
particularly consistent until now, where some studies suggest that (accusative) direct-object clitics are largely omitted by
children with SLI (Tsimpli and Stavrakaki, 1999; Tsimpli, 2001), while others do not confirm that finding (Varlokosta, 2002;
Manika et al., 2011). It is thus not clear whether clitic production could be a suitable clinical marker for SLI in Greek.
All of the above suggests cross-linguistic variation in the production of clitics by children with SLI. In this article, we
discuss whether third-person direct-object clitic pronouns constitute an area of difficulty for children with SLI acquiring the
Cypriot variety of Modern Greek. Going a step further, we will critically examine the possibility of using clitics as a clinical
marker for the identification of SLI in Cypriot Greek, as it has been claimed for other languages.
2. Background
2.1. Specific language impairment
Language acquisition is one of the most robust yet largely intrinsically driven processes of early childhood (see, among
many others, Chomsky, 1986 for theoretical discussion of what he dubbed ‘Plato’s problem’). However, not all children
acquire language fully or even effortlessly. The term ‘specific language impairment’, the main interest of the current study,
is applied to children that exhibit a significant deficit in language ability yet display normal hearing, age-appropriate scores
on tests of non-verbal intelligence, and no obvious signs of neurological damage or social-emotional deprivation---some
standard criteria listed by Leonard (1998).
The description of deviant or inferior language ability in SLI is usually based on (i) characteristics of children’s
spontaneous speech output and (ii) children’s performance on concrete linguistic tasks tapping into different language
components (such as morphology, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics as well as the lexicon). There is now
increasing evidence to suggest that children with SLI can present with different patterns of impairment based on
which modules of the language system are impaired or spared, hence the absence of homogeneity in the disorder
(e.g., Leonard, 1998; van der Lely, 2003; Friedmann and Novogrodsky, 2008).
It is possible to diagnose SLI adequately only after the age of 4, given that many children presenting signs of a ‘delay’ in
language development are ‘late bloomers’ who manage to catch up with typically developing children (Rescorla, 1989).
An epidemiological study showed that the incidence of SLI is around 7% among preschoolers, with males more affected
than females (Tomblin et al., 1997), whereas only 29% of the parents of children with SLI had been informed about their
children’s language problem previous to the research. Thus, 70% of affected children were not identified or diagnosed---
and therefore not enrolled in clinical services (Tallal et al., 1989). Unfortunately, there are no more recent data we know of
available on the percentage of identified language-impaired populations. For many individuals, language deficits persist
much into later childhood, adolescence, and even adulthood (e.g., Aram and Nation, 1980; Paul et al., 1983; Nippold and
Fey, 1983; Ullman and Gopnik, 1994). In addition, follow-up studies have shown that language problems are also
associated with social difficulties which are still evident in adolescence and adulthood (Clegg et al., 2005) as well as
general learning difficulties (Snowling et al., 2001).
2.2. Direct object clitic placement in CG and SMG
The Greek-speaking Republic of Cyprus is an apparently clear case of a diglossic speech community, where the
sociolinguistically ‘high’ variety is typically taken to be Standard Modern Greek (SMG)---Demotic Greek, the same official
language spoken in the Hellenic Republic of Greece, of which no Greek Cypriot is a native speaker---and the ‘low’ variety is
the vernacular Cypriot Greek (CG). As can be expected, the differences between the two reach far, clearly beyond the
obvious (vocabulary, pronunciation, prosody). Among the better understood differences between CG and SMG are
lexical, phonetic, and (morpho)phonological properties of the language (since the seminal study of Newton, 1972, see e.g.
Arvaniti, 2001; Petinou and Okalidou, 2006; Theodorou, 2007; Okalidou et al., 2010), with a comprehensive, formal
description of CG syntax lagging behind. However, a very clear and well documented morphosyntactic difference
between the two varieties is clitic placement, as has been shown in a host of different works stretching from Agouraki
(1997, 2001) and Terzi (1999a,b) to the more recent Chatzikyriakidis (2010, 2012), among others, as well as Revithiadou
(2006) and Revithiadou and Spyropoulos (2008) with emphasis on phonological aspects of cliticization, and even
sociolinguistically as in Pappas (2012).
Terzi (1999b) characterized CG as a Tobler--Mussafia-type language, which is the reason that by default, clitics follow
the verb (‘enclisis’) rather than precede it (‘proclisis’). In other words, CG follows a pattern of mixed clitic placement, with
enclisis being the unmarked option and proclisis required in particular structural environments. Similar behavior in clitic
placement is exhibited in European Portuguese (Duarte and Matos, 2000). In many syntactic environments that are
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E. Theodorou, K.K. Grohmann / Lingua xxx (2014) xxx--xxx 3
default for postverbal clitic placement in CG, SMG requires preverbal clitic placement by default, similarly to Spanish and
most other Romance varieties compared to European Portuguese.
In CG, as in SMG, third-person direct-object clitics are derived from strong pronouns; clitics are marked for number,
gender, and case. Concerning the particular characteristics of mixed clitic placement, it can be observed that certain
syntactic environments enforce preverbal placement---otherwise enclisis is found. So, clitics in CG can appear
postverbally in both imperative and non-imperative contexts, whereas in SMG they can only appear as enclitics in
imperatives and gerunds. The data below illustrate the relevant differences between the two varieties:
(1) Non-imperative context:

a. (o Jannis) θcavazi/ ðʝavazi to vivlio. [CG/SMG]
the John reads the book
‘John is reading the book.’
b. (o Jannis) θcavazi to. [CG]
the John reads it-CL
‘John is reading it.’
c. (o Jannis) to ðʝavazi. [SMG]
the John it-CL reads
‘John is reading it.’
(2) Imperative context:
a. θcevase to! [CG]
b. ðiavase to! [SMG]
read.IMP it-CL
‘Read it!’
(3) Gerundive context:
a. θcevazontas to [CG]
b. ðʝavazontas to [SMG]
reading.PART it-CL
‘reading it’
On the other hand, clitics appear preverbally in case a linguistic element appears in the left periphery of the clause---in
particular, wh-elements and relative operators trigger proclisis in CG; the same holds for negative contexts and the
subjunctive marker na. This is exemplified for both Greek varieties in (4), where we only signal the different phonetic forms
of the verb (and negation).
(4) a. wh-question:
pu to θcavazi/ðʝavazi (o Jannis)? [CG/SMG]
where it-CL reads (the John)?
‘Where does John read it?’
b. relative clause:
o andras pu to θcavazi/ðʝavazi [CG/SMG]
the man that it-CL reads
‘the man who/that reads it’
c. negative clause:
en/ðen to θcavazi/ðʝavazi (o Jannis) [CG/SMG]
not it-CL reads (the John)
‘Jannis doesn’t read it.’
d. subjunctive clause:
perimeno na to θcavasi/ðʝavasi (o Jannis). [CG/SMG]
expect to it-CL read (the John)
‘I expect [Jannis to read it].’
This brief exposition shall suffice for present purposes. The only environment tested in the present experimental design
is a version of (1), namely a declarative context---however, with a further complication. We will return to this briefly in our
discussion (section 4).
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2.3. Clitic acquisition
During the past couple of decades, the acquisition of object clitics has been investigated extensively for many
languages. Studies have shown that clitics are vulnerable elements for (a)typical acquisition in a range of different
languages. In particular, there are two distinct types of languages with regard to clitic acquisition, one for which clitic
acquisition is problematic and another for which it is not. Languages of the first type include French, Italian, Catalan, and
European Portuguese (e.g., Guasti, 1993/1994; Haegeman, 1996; Hamann et al., 1996; Schaeffer, 1997; Costa and
Lobo, 2007). The characteristics that are shared between these languages are frequent omission of clitics in obligatory
contexts, late appearance of clitic production in spontaneous language production data, and use of full DPs in place of
clitics. The latter type includes Spanish, Romanian, and Greek, both SMG and CG (Lyczkowski, 1999; Marinis, 2000;
Tsakali and Wexler, 2004; Wexler et al., 2004; Babyonyshev and Marin, 2005; Grohmann et al., 2012). The shared
characteristics of these languages are rare omission of clitics in obligatory contexts, early occurrence of clitics in
spontaneous language production data, and low use of full DPs in place of clitics.
Regarding the emergence of clitics in child language, research attests cross-linguistic differences. Thus, French-
speaking children were found to produce object clitics later than subject and reflexive clitics, namely between the ages of
2;6 and 3;0 (years;months), although they still omit clitics at age 3 (e.g., Hamann et al., 1996; Granfeldt and Schlyter,
2004; Jakubowicz et al., 1997); the same holds for Italian-speaking children (Guasti, 1993/1994; Schaeffer, 1997). On the
other hand, researchers also noticed earlier appearance of clitics in children’s data for languages such as (Standard
Modern) Greek (Tsakali and Wexler, 2004), Spanish (Wexler et al., 2004), and Romanian (Babyonyshev and Marin,
2005).
Turning now to the present language of interest, Petinou and Terzi (2002), in the very first study on the acquisition of
clitics in CG, suggested that children achieved clitic placement before the age of 3. However, this age is not representative
of clitic appearance as it refers to placement rather than emergence, an issue that is evident in languages with mixed clitic
placement such as CG (Petinou and Terzi, 2002; Neokleous, 2013) and European Portuguese (Costa and Lobo, 2007). In
a recent study employing the same elicitation task as here, for example, Grohmann et al. (2012) found that CG-speaking
children at the age of 2;9 produce clitics with ease. Likewise, Neokleous (2013), who tested younger children using a
semi-structured elicitation task, different from the present one, found that even children aged 2;6 produced a high
percentage of adult-like clitics in enclisis contexts.
What seems to be a fair assessment under anyone’s view is that certainly by age 5, clitics have been acquired for
productive, adult-like use by children acquiring any clitic language natively. Varlokosta et al. (under review) report the
results from studies carried out within COST Action A33 which assessed 5-year-olds’ production of clitics across a variety
of languages in the same context, using the same tool as in the present study. Not only was there no clitic misplacement in
any of the clitic languages tested, but, aside from some irregularities discussed in that article, clitic production was very
high across all participants.
Grohmann (2014a) summarizes the results from subsequent administrations of the present elicitation tool within the
Cyprus Acquisition Team to a large number of children, including 623 bilectal children between the ages of 2;8 and 8;11, of
whom 440 matched the ages tested here (see section 3.1). In the studies listed by Grohmann, additional populations were
tested as well, including monolingual SMG-speaking children residing in Cyprus (with two Hellenic Greek parents, from
Greece), Hellenic Greek/Cypriot binational children (with one parent Hellenic Greek, the other Greek Cypriot), and
Russian--Greek bilingual children (with a Russian mother and a Greek Cypriot father) as well as Greek Cypriot
adolescents and adults. Concerning the typically developing target population tested in the present study, the children
aged 5--9 behave very much in line with the larger pool reported there. From a methodological point of view, then, we
consider the following to stand on firm grounds.
2.4. Clitics in SLI
Many studies so far have identified grammatical morphemes that could serve as a clinical marker for SLI, which might
thus be employed in diagnostic tools. In the course of the identification of such clinical markers, (direct-object) clitics
have been proposed as morphosyntactic entities whose production and proper use represent a problematic domain for
children with SLI. In general, research on SLI showed that clitics are often omitted in contexts in which they are obligatory
(see e.g. Torrens and Wexler, 1996; Bottari et al., 1998 for early works).
Thus, clitics have been argued to constitute a clinical marker for SLI in such languages as French (Jakubowicz et al.,
1998), Italian (Leonard et al., 1992; Bottari et al., 1998; Bortolini et al., 2002), or Catalan (Gavarró, 2012), where affected
children tend to omit clitics---like younger typically developing children do, as reported in the literature for several
languages, including European Portuguese (Costa and Lobo, 2007), French (Friedemann, 1993/1994; Hamann et al.,
1996), Italian (Guasti, 1993/1994; Schaeffer, 1997), Serbo-Croatian (Ilic and Ud Deen, 2004), and Spanish (Montrul,
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2004). More recently, a study by Tuller et al. (2011) showed that accusative clitic production remained weak in
adolescents whose language developed impaired.
For French, Jakubowicz et al. (1998) used an elicitation task to test whether children with SLI exhibit difficulty in clitic
production. They studied a group of 13 children with SLI, with a mean age of 8;11 years (age range: 5;7--13;0), and
found that children produced only 25.2% correct clitics. In addition, they investigated the comprehension ability of
children in a separate task. Their correct responses reached the rate of 80.8%, showing that even though children
understand clitics, they cannot produce them. In a subsequent study, Hamann et al. (2003) investigated spontaneous
language samples of two groups of children with SLI. The first group included six children aged 3;10 to 5;0, and the
second five children aged 5;7 to 7;11. The analysis showed that the two groups produced clitics at a rate of 18% and 40%,
respectively.
Turning now to Italian, research by Bottari et al. (1998), investigating the spontaneous language samples of 11 children
with SLI (mean age 6;3), showed that they omitted clitics at a rate of 41.1%. However, the authors pointed out that
individual variation was attested. Later, Bortolini et al. (2002) went a step further and checked whether clitics could serve
as an accurate clinical marker for 15 Italian-speaking preschool children with SLI, aged 4;0 to 6;0 years, applying a
regression analysis. With respect to classification accuracy, their analysis yielded high sensitivity (86.67%) and specificity
(93.33%). Their findings thus demonstrated that clitics are indeed a very good clinical marker for SLI---at least in Italian. In
a subsequent study with similar goals, Bortolini et al. (2006) investigated 11 children with SLI, aged 3;7 to 5;6, in an
elicitation task. They found that children produced clitics only at 16.8%, highlighting that the main errors were omissions.
They also concluded that clitics could serve as a clinical marker separately or jointly with other measures, given the high
sensitivity and specificity they displayed. More recently, Arosio et al. (2010) aimed to explore whether clitics remain a
problematic area for school-aged children with SLI. They studied 10 children with SLI, aged 6;4 to 8;7, in an elicitation task.
Their findings suggest that children with SLI, even at school age, still display problems with clitics, since they produced
clitics only at around 60% of the time, with the main errors being omissions. Thus, the authors conclude that clitic
production could be a good clinical marker even for school-aged children.
As for Catalan, Gavarró (2012) presented data from only two Catalan-speaking children with SLI. The spontaneous
language data of those two children are available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney and Snow, 1985). The data
comprise four recordings between the ages of 3;9 to 4;9 for the first child, and 3;8 to 4;10 for the second child. In line with
the studies mentioned above, the children omitted clitics at an average rate of 66.6%. Gavarró (2012) compared these
results with a study from Spanish (De La Mora, 2004) which found that Spanish-speaking children with SLI exhibited an
omission rate in spontaneous speech at around 8%. With regard to Spanish, another study conducted by Bedore and
Leonard (2001) investigated 15 Mexican Spanish-speaking children with SLI, aged 3;11 to 5;6, using an elicitation task.
Although the researchers suggested that the performance of the children with SLI was lower than that of the typically
developing controls, this difference was not significant. As for clitics, the omission rate was not so high, where children with
SLI omitted clitics around 12.7% of the time.
In what follows, we will turn the discussion to the findings from SMG and CG. During the last decade, several studies
have investigated the production of clitics in Greek-speaking children with SLI. However, the findings of these studies
have not fully matched up until now. Indeed, while some researchers suggest that accusative direct-object clitics are
largely omitted by children with SLI (Tsimpli and Stavrakaki, 1999; Tsimpli, 2001), other studies did not confirm that finding
(Varlokosta, 2002; Manika et al., 2011). Tsimpli and Stavrakaki (1999), and Tsimpli (2001), analyzed the spontaneous
speech of a 5;5-year-old girl diagnosed with SLI and reported clitic omission of 96%. Tsimpli (2001) also analyzed the
spontaneous speech of seven children with SLI. She still found a low rate of clitic production (3.8%). Later, Smith et al.
(2008), using an elicitation procedure, studied nine children with SLI aged 4;9 to 6;9 years (mean age 5;11). They still
found clitic omission, but the percentage was only 24%. More recently, Manika et al. (2011) carried out an elicitation
experiment with 19 children with SLI between the ages of 4;10 and 8;1 (mean age 6;2). In this case, they found no
difference at all between the performance of children with SLI and controls with typical language development, who
produced the expected clitics over 95% of the time. Finally, Varlokosta et al. (2012) compared the performance in clitic
production of a group of seven children with SLI, aged 4;11 to 7;10 (mean age 6;4), with a control group of 14 typically
developing children, aged 4;4 to 6;4 (mean age 5;2), using an elicitation task (from COST Action A33, which we will
present below in detail for our own study). Their results suggest that there is no significant difference in clitic production
between children with SLI and children with typical language development. In sum, then, the research so far does not
allow us to confirm whether clitics constitute a problematic domain for Greek-speaking children with SLI, and more
research clearly needs to be done.
As for CG, until recently, there was only one published research study with regard to clitics in SLI, which, moreover,
focused on clitic misplacement rather on clitic omission. Petinou and Terzi (2002) investigated whether children with SLI
exhibit non-adult-like clitic placement in contexts where proclisis is required. Leaving aside whether children as young as
they studied can positively assessed for SLI, they found that even at the age of 4;6, children with SLI frequently misplace
clitics.
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The above clearly suggests cross-linguistic variation in the production of clitics by children with SLI, showcasing the
need for further, and perhaps more thorough, investigations for each language.
3. The study
In this study, we aim to contribute to the ongoing investigation on the identification of clinical markers that can be
utilized to diagnose SLI. Thus the objectives of this study are: (i) to report whether object clitics could be a clinical marker
for SLI in CG, the Cypriot variety of Modern Greek, (ii) to explore the quantitative and/or qualitative differences between
typically developing children and children with SLI, and (iii) to determine any differences between younger and older
children.
3.1. Participants
A total of 38 CG-speaking children aged 5 to 9 years participated in this study. The children were divided into four
groups: two groups of children with SLI and two groups of age-matched typically developing (TD) children. The younger
group of participants with SLI included nine children (SLI-Y: seven boys and two girls, mean age 5;6, SD 0;3), and the
older group seven children (SLI-O: three boys and four girls, mean age 7;8, SD 0;8). The younger group of TD participants
included 10 children (TD-Y: six boys and four girls, mean age 5;8, SD 0;6), and the older group 12 children (TD-O: six boys
and six girls, mean age 7;10, SD 0;6). We chose to compare the two groups of children with SLI to chronological age-
matched groups only, rather than an additional group of language age-matched children, following the proposed practice
in assessing the accuracy of clinical markers (Plante and Vance, 1994; Bortolini et al., 2002, 2006). The details are
provided in Table 1.
Subject selection criteria included: (i) ‘monolingual’ CG-speaking background, (ii) no history of neurological, emotional,
developmental, or behavioral problems, (iii) hearing and vision adequate for test purposes, (iv) normal performance on a
measure of non-verbal intelligence (Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices), (v) no gross motor difficulties, and (vi)
medium to high socio-economic status. All information was obtained either from their speech therapists and teachers or
from their parents.
Adopting the notion of ‘(discrete) bilectalism’ from Rowe and Grohmann (2013), we consider ‘monolingual’ children in
diglossic speaker communities to be (at least) bilectal in the ‘high’ and ‘low’ varieties (see Kambanaros et al., 2013a for the
first published study on child language implementing this term); at most, they would arguably be bilingual (cf. Antoniou et
al., 2014; Grohmann, 2014b), something that we will bear in mind for our ongoing investigations of language development
in Cyprus (see also Grohmann and Leivada, 2012; Grohmann et al., 2012; Kambanaros et al., 2012, 2013b; Kambanaros
and Grohmann, 2013). With respect to the children participating in the present study, however, we can confidently state
that they were all bilectal in CG (the native variety, spoken at home) and SMG, or some such high form which Arvaniti
(2010) dubbed ‘Cypriot Standard Greek’ (introduced formally in preschool, language of media and formal
communication)---as understood through the works cited. In particular, none of them were simultaneous or sequential
acquirers of an additional language; likewise, no child was a native speaker of SMG or received, to the best of our
knowledge, more input in SMG than any other.
All children came from urban Limassol and surrounding areas. Parental consent forms and an informative letter were
distributed, and only those children whose parents approved took part in the investigation. No other attempt was made in
order to determine, control, or otherwise influence the number of participants; all children with a signed parental consent
form were tested. The TD children were recruited from different public (pre-)primary schools with permission from the
Center of Educational Research and Evaluation. According to their teachers and parents, participants in the control
groups were typically developing in all respects. None of the children had a referral from or underwent treatment by
speech and language therapists.
Table 1
Participant details.
Group Age range Number of participants Mean Stand. dev. Gender
TD-Y 4;5--6;6 10 5;8 0;6 6M, 4F

TD-O 6;7--8;7 12 7;10 0,6 6M, 6F
SLI-Y 4;11--5;11 9 5;6 0;3 7M, 2F
SLI-O 6;7--8;1 7 7;8 0;8 3M, 4F
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Children with SLI were recruited through speech and language therapists either in private settings or in mainstream
public schools. Two certified speech and language therapists who work in two private settings in Limassol were asked to
refer children for this study that showed marked language impairment in the absence of any other difficulty. Given that
practices in terms of diagnosis might be different among the clinics, it is essential for researchers who conduct research on
SLI to document their criteria well for the diagnosis. Thus, the protocol used for the current study includes the previous
identification of the participating children by certified speech and language therapists based on case history, informal
testing in terms of comprehension and production, analysis of language sample, and observation. Before any referral, the
first author, a trained and licensed speech and language therapist with clinical experience of 11 years, thoroughly
informed the therapists who referred the participants for the purposes of this research about the expected difficulties of the
children based on the criteria included in Leonard (1998) and the more recent DSM-IV (2010). Meetings with the therapists
were also arranged to provide them with a detailed description of the research and to answer their questions. The prior
clinical diagnosis was confirmed by the first author, who conducted a large battery of tests included in her doctoral
dissertation (Theodorou, 2013). The full assessment battery included measures of non-verbal intelligence, receptive
vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, comprehension and production of morphosyntax, metalinguistic concepts, sentence
repetition, narrative retelling, articulation and phonological processing, word definitions, sound distinctions, and word
finding.
The procedure that was followed in terms of the gold standard of diagnosis aimed to ensure that the diagnosis is
reliable, valid, and reasonable with respect to Dollaghan’s (2004) suggestion on diagnosis in the absence of available
standardized tests. Thus, in the present study, the standard for determining each participant’s status as impaired or not
involved a combination of clinical judgment and informal testing.
3.2. Methodology
For the purposes of this research, the COST Action A33 Clitics-in-Islands testing tool (Varlokosta et al., under review),
designed to elicit clitic production even in languages that allow object drop such as European Portuguese (Costa and
Lobo, 2007), was adapted to CG (Grohmann, 2011; see Grohmann et al., 2012 for further discussion and Grohmann,
2014a for a full overview of all investigations carried out in the Cyprus Acquisition Team to date). This tool is an elicitation
production task for third-person singular accusative direct object clitics within syntactic islands, where the target-elicited
clitic in each test structure was embedded within a because-clause. An example is provided in (5), where the target clitic to
be elicited is boldfaced.
R
(5) I mama xtenizi tin korua t e i korua en omorfi. Jati i korua en omorfi? I korua en omorfi jati i mama
tis. . . [xtenizi tin].
‘Mommy is combing the girl and the girl is beautiful. Why is the girl beautiful? The girl is beautiful because
her mommy. . . [combs her-CL].’
The task involved a total of 19 items; 12 target structures (i.e. test items) after 2 warm-ups, plus 5 fillers. All target
structures included an indicative declarative clause formed around a transitive verb, with half of them in present tense and
the other half in past tense. Children were shown a colored sketch picture on a laptop screen, depicting the situation
described by the experimenter. The scene depicted in Fig. 1 corresponds to the story and sentence completion in (5), for
example:
All tests were carried out by native speakers of CG. Testing was conducted in a quiet room individually (child and
researcher). Most children were tested in their schools and in speech therapy clinics, but a few were tested at their homes.
Greek Cypriots tend to code-switch to SMG or some hyper-corrected form of ‘high CG’ when talking to strangers or in
formal contexts (see e.g. Arvaniti, 2010; Grohmann and Leivada, 2012; Rowe and Grohmann (2013), and references
cited). So, in order to avoid a formal setting as much as possible and to obtain some kind of familiarity between
experimenter and child, a brief conversation about a familiar topic took place before the testing started, such as the child’s
favorite cartoons.
All participants received the task in one session, in combination with other tasks included in Theodorou (2013). The
particular task lasted no longer than 15 min, for typically developing children usually no more than 10 min even. The
pictures were displayed on a laptop screen which both experimenter and participant could see. The child participant heard
the description of each picture that the experimenter provided and then had to fill in (parts of) a because-clause in which
the use of a clitic was expected; some participants started with because on their own, others filled in right after the
experimenter’s prompt of because, and yet others completed the sentence only after the experimenter continued with the
subject (the bracketed part in (5) above). No verbal reinforcement was provided other than encouragement with head
nods and fillers. Self-correction was not registered; only the first response was recorded and used for data collection and
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[(Fig._1)TD$IG]
Fig. 1. Test item #2 (example).
analysis purposes. The experiments were not audio- or video-taped, but answers were recorded by the researcher on a
score sheet during the session; this direct responses recording could be easily and correctly attained because of the short
response demanded by the experiment.
3.3. Results
The percentages of clitics produced, either preverbally or postverbally, by each group of children are illustrated in
Graph 1, and the mean scores of each group are presented in Table 2 together with the standard deviation (SD).
All four groups performed almost at ceiling in clitic production. The percentage for the production of clitics between the
SLI and TD groups looks very close. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), with the linguistic group as independent
variable and the percentage of correct clitics produced as dependent variable, was conducted in order to check whether
there were any significant differences between the groups. The analysis revealed no significant difference at the p < .05
level between the groups, F(3,34) = 1.733, p = 0.79.
We then turned our attention to clitic placement, arguably the hallmark difference between the dialect and the standard
variety; recall that for the tested structure, only the enclisis pattern was expected. As shown in the original pilot study in
Cyprus (Grohmann, 2011), adults produce 100% enclisis, repeated in subsequent research with larger number of
teenagers and adults (Agathocleous et al., 2014); we will return to this in the discussion below (section 4).
Graph 2 shows preverbal and postverbal clitic placement for each of the four participant groups (younger and older TD
children as well as younger and older children with SLI), while Table 3 displays the mean score and standard deviation for
these criteria for each of the four groups.
While all participating groups of children produced preverbal clitics, they did so to different degrees; both enclisis and
proclisis were employed by each of the four groups. This finding is similar to the results on TD children reported in
Grohmann (2011). Interestingly, the younger children with SLI produced fewer preverbal clitics compared to the other
[(Graph_1)TD$FI]
100%
96.67% 98.58% 97.58%
91.67%
75%
50%
25%
0%
TD1 TD2 SLI1 SLI2
Graph 1. Percentages of clitic production.
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Table 2
Mean clitic production.
Group Mean (out of 12) SD
TD-Y 11.60 1.26

TD-O 11.83 0.39
SLI-Y 11.00 1.00
SLI-O 11.71 0.49
[(Graph_2)TD$FI]
12
10
8
Overall cl. prod.
6
Pre-verbal cl.
4 plac.
Post-verbal cl.
2 plac.
0
TD-Y TD-O SLI-Y SLI-O
Graph 2. Preverbal and postverbal clitic placement.
three groups. That is to say, the younger children with SLI used the expected enclisis pattern more consistently. On the
other hand, the older children with SLI used more preverbal clitics than their age-matched TD peers, and indeed than the
younger children with SLI.
In order to find out whether the observed differences are significant, a one-way ANOVA was carried out. Statistical
analysis revealed that there is a significant difference between the groups in terms of clitic placement at p < .05 level, F
(3,34) = 5,684, p = 0.003. Scheffé post hoc comparisons of the groups indicated that the performance on clitic placement
differs significantly between younger SLI and older TD ( p = 0.039) and younger SLI and older SLI ( p = 0.005). No
significant differences yield between (i) the younger children with SLI and the younger TD children ( p = 0.212), (ii) older
TD and older SLI ( p = 0.631), (iii) older SLI and younger TD ( p = 0.287), and (iv) younger TD and older TD ( p = 0.881).
These findings for the children with SLI with regard to clitic placement turned our interest to individual results. Graph 3
illustrates how many preverbal clitics were used by each child included in the groups of younger TD children and younger
children with SLI.
As can be seen, some of the TD children mixed pre- and postverbal clitics, while others placed most, if not all, of the
clitics preverbally (yet two of the TD children placed them postverbally). This confirms our previous findings reported by
Grohmann et al. (2012). It is worthwhile to look closer at the children with SLI: although two children used many preverbal
clitics, the remaining seven used either none or only one preverbal clitic (out of 12 target structures). It thus seems that
there is a trend for younger children with SLI to produce en- rather than proclitics, although the difference between the two
groups is not significant, as already mentioned.
The picture changes when the focus is moved to the older groups. Graph 4 illustrates how many preverbal clitics were
used by each child included in the groups of older TD children and older children with SLI.
Table 3
Preverbal and postverbal clitic placement.
Group Overall production SD Preverbal placement SD Postverbal placement SD
TD-Y 11.6 1.26 6.9 5.04 4.7 4.60

TD-O 11.8 0.39 8.4 4.62 3.4 4.44
SLI-Y 11.0 1.00 2.5 4.59 8.5 4.64
SLI-O 11.7 0.49 11.1 1.21 0.6 0.98
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[(Graph_3)TD$FI]
12
10
6 TD-Y
SLI-Y
4
0
0 5 10 15 20
Graph 3. Individual responses for younger TD and SLI (preverbal clitic production).
The older TD children still mix clitic placement, though a trend for (non-CG target) preverbal clitic placement appears.
Notably, children with SLI show a clear preference for preverbal clitic placement as well. Comparing these findings with
the results from both the younger SLI group and the older TD group, it can be seen that not only did the older children with
SLI produce more preverbal clitics than the younger ones, but they also produced more preverbal clitics than their age-
matched TD peers, even if the difference does not approach significance. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, as
pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, that each of the older children with SLI produced more pre- than postverbal clitics,
whereas four out of the 12 TD children did not.
An NPar binomial test for each group was conducted in order to check whether the observed differences in clitic
placement among the participants are significant. The analysis showed no significant differences between post- and
preverbal clitic placement for the younger and the older children with typical language development ( p = 0.774 and
p = 0.109, respectively), and the older children with SLI ( p = 0.453); therefore, the null hypothesis is accepted for these
three groups. For the younger children with SLI, a significant difference was detected ( p = 0.039); namely, they tend to
use post-verbal clitics rather than mixing them.
4. Discussion
The aims of this study were (i) to investigate whether object clitics could serve as a clinical marker for CG-speaking
children with SLI, (ii) to explore whether there are any quantitative and/or qualitative differences between CG-speaking
[(Graph_4)TD$FI]
12
10
6 TD-O
SLI-O
4
0
0 5 10 15 20
Graph 4. Individual responses for older TD and SLI (preverbal clitic production).
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children with typical language development and those with specific language impairment, and (iii) to determine possible
differences between young children and older children.
Our findings suggest that there are no quantitative differences between children with SLI and TD peers in terms of
correct clitic production in the specific context that was assessed. The statistical analysis revealed that both groups of
children performed equally well. This result is very similar to the findings for SMG from Manika et al. (2011) and Varlokosta
et al. (2012), who also used elicitation tasks for the production of object clitics; in fact, Varlokosta et al. (2012) carried out
the same experimental tool from COST Action A33 (though in SMG; cf. section 2.3). However, our findings with regard to
clitic production stand in contrast to Tsimpli and Stavrakaki (1999), who examined a spontaneous language sample of a
girl with SLI 5;5 years of age and found a very high rate of clitic omission (96%). Likewise, Tsimpli (2001), who evaluated
the spontaneous speech of seven children with SLI, found a very low rate of clitic production, only 3.8%. Even though
these comparative studies were carried out on children acquiring SMG in Greece rather than Cyprus, there seems to be a
marked difference in the production of clitics across studies as concerns the plausibility of clitic production to be used as a
clinical marker for SLI in Greek.
How could these differences be accounted for? We would like to suggest that they reside in the procedures that were
followed to gather data---i.e. spontaneous speech samples versus elicitation tasks. However, it is worthwhile to report that
data from French showed that elicited production favors omission (Tuller et al., 2011). Furthermore, the present study was
also used to help identify children with SLI in relation to clinical diagnosis, in addition to their performance in a variety of
language tests and exclusionary criteria (Theodorou, 2013), while other studies identified children with SLI by making use
either of experimental test results (e.g., Poll et al., 2010; Bedore and Leonard, 2001) or prior clinical diagnosis (e.g., Conti-
Ramsden et al., 2001; Moyle et al., 2011).
Returning to the first question, whether clitic production could serve as a clinical marker for the identification of SLI in
CG-speaking children, findings so far cannot support this claim, since no significant difference was revealed between
impaired and non-impaired participants. Because of this, no further analysis with regard to sensitivity and specificity of the
measure was carried out, since, in order to check the diagnostic accuracy of a test, a significant difference needs to be
established in the first place between impaired and non-impaired populations.
This said, though, an interesting finding that was observed here is that younger children with SLI produced fewer
preverbal clitics, while TD children mixed the two patterns, proclisis and enclisis. In contrast, this is not the case for the
group of the older children with SLI, who produced more preverbal clitics than the age-matched controls and the younger
children with SLI. The question that arises at this point is why children with SLI would behave like that.
With regard to the younger group, similar performance is reported for typical language development in Neokleous
(2013), where 18 TD children aged 2;6 to 3;0 produced a high rate of the enclisis pattern. This observation leads us to
suggest (i) that children with SLI behave like younger TD children in terms of clitic placement, in line with previous studies
in the field (e.g., Jakubowicz et al., 1997, 1998; Leonard, 1998), and (ii) to agree with Neokleous (2013) in that enclisis is
the default pattern for CG (see Agouraki, 1997 and subsequent theoretical work on the syntax of CG), which facilitates
both young children and children with SLI. With regard to the older group of children with SLI, it can be seen that the vast
majority prefers using preverbal clitics. As the analysis suggests, the difference between younger children with SLI and
older children with SLI is significant.
We surmise that this is so because of their enrollment in instructed speech sessions not only during school time but at
outside-school speech and language therapy as well. We should also mention (anecdotally, though on firm assumptions)
that teachers and therapists, in an attempt to model a proper language, use preverbal clitics, since this is one grammatical
difference between SMG and CG they know and understand well. Pupils are exposed to clitics in preverbal position when
teachers read during class, for example; the same goes for speech therapy sessions. The result from this convention is
mixed input.
Finally, in terms of theoretical impact, the results of the current study confirm the suggestion that object clitics constitute
a problematic domain only for a subset of languages but not for others, and this is the case not only for typical language
development but for SLI as well (see also Gavarró et al., 2010). Correspondingly, CG (and possibly SMG as well) would
then belong to that subset of languages for which clitics are not an area of difficulty---at least, not in terms of production.
Concerning the syntax of clitic placement in CG, we only want to add one more note. What may make matters more
complicated is the fact that in our elicitation task, the syntactic context is embedded within a because-clause. According to
most of the syntactic analyses mentioned above (section 2.2), starting with Agouraki (1997), such a context should give
rise to proclisis in CG, since, with an overt complementizer in the left periphery (jati ‘because’), there is a trigger for
preverbal clitic placement, as also pointed out by an anonymous reviewer. This reviewer in fact suggested that the
structural context in the stimuli used in the present study forms some ‘‘exception of an exception’’ (see also
Chatzikyriakidis, 2012; Pappas, 2012). However, we contend that matters are indeed even more complicated. Note that
we did not discuss adult control data in this paper. Originally, eight CG-speaking adults were tested, who all produced
100% enclisis in the tool employed here (from Grohmann, 2011). In subsequent studies, summarized in Grohmann
(2014a), we increased the number of adult participants, included teenagers, and modified the task (even using a shorter
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version with a matrix response, i.e. one lacking the embedding within a because-clause)---the result was a constant, clear
preference for postverbal clitic placement, 100% for the 10 teenagers tested on the tool administered here (Agathocleous,
2012), 100% for 10 more teenagers tested on the shorter version (Charalambous, 2012), and slightly lower but still
predominantly postverbal numbers from 26 additional adults (Leivada et al., 2010; Agathocleous, 2012; Charalambous,
2012). This has clear implications for the above-mentioned theoretical approaches to CG clitic placement, and the
possible tie-in with an overt complementizer, which we will address in future work.
Before summing up, some limitations of this study are in order. The first limitation is related to subject selection. The
data sets come from a group of language-impaired children, the vast majority already enrolled in speech and
language therapy at the time of testing. So, they might have overcome any prior difficulties in clitic production before the
testing due to therapy intervention. However, from the first author’s experience as a speech and language therapist in
school settings, goals with regard to the morphosyntax and -phonology of clitics could not be found in her colleagues’
therapy plans, at least those that were accessible to her, so this is a rather unlikely possibility.
Another possible limitation of the study could be the small number of participants in each group. However, in similar
studies, the number of participants that were examined was also small. For example, Bortolini et al. (2002) evaluated 15
TD children and 15 children with SLI, whereas Smith et al. (2008) compared nine children from each group. Likewise,
Gavarró (2012), who examined Catalan clitics in SLI, presented data from two children with SLI found in the CHILDES
database.
A potentially third limitation might be that the experimental study was limited to the evaluation of only a small subset of
clitics. Specifically, it examined only third-person accusative object clitics in declarative clauses, namely within syntactic
islands where the target-elicited clitic was embedded in a declarative clauses introduced by because, which provided the
syntactic island environment in relation to the clitics’ antecedent. We suspect, following Petinou and Terzi (2002), that
children with SLI might misplace clitics in structures that involve subjunctives and negation where clitics appear before the
verb obligatorily. Thus more research in terms of these structures is suggested---though, as mentioned above, our
research group has tested a considerable number of TD children from a variety of backgrounds (reported in Grohmann,
2014a).
In sum, despite the fact that there are some limitations, they are hardly unique to this particular study. These are typical
shortcomings underlying much of the existing cross-linguistic research cited here as well. Future research should make a
serious attempt to tackle them, though not only in Cyprus (which we are already doing).
5. Conclusion
This study aimed to shed some light on the question whether bilectal children with SLI natively acquiring Cypriot Greek
exhibit difficulties with the production of direct object clitics in the context assessed. Overall, findings do not suggest that
clitic production could serve as a clinical marker for SLI in CG, but interesting findings with regard to clitic placement were
evident that might promote the theoretical discussion around clitics in children’s language development.
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Object clitics in Cypriot Greek children with SLI

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +357 25390706.

2 E. Theodorou, K.K. Grohmann / Lingua xxx (2014) xxx--xxx

2.1. Specific language impairment

2.2. Direct object clitic placement in CG and SMG

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(1) Non-imperative context:

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2.3. Clitic acquisition

2.4. Clitics in SLI

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6 E. Theodorou, K.K. Grohmann / Lingua xxx (2014) xxx--xxx

Group Age range Number of participants Mean Stand. dev. Gender

TD-Y 4;5--6;6 10 5;8 0;6 6M, 4F

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Fig. 1. Test item #2 (example).

Graph 1. Percentages of clitic production.

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Group Mean (out of 12) SD

TD-Y 11.60 1.26

Graph 2. Preverbal and postverbal clitic placement.

Group Overall production SD Preverbal placement SD Postverbal placement SD

TD-Y 11.6 1.26 6.9 5.04 4.7 4.60

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12 E. Theodorou, K.K. Grohmann / Lingua xxx (2014) xxx--xxx

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14 E. Theodorou, K.K. Grohmann / Lingua xxx (2014) xxx--xxx

E. Theodorou, K.K. Grohmann / Lingua xxx (2014) xxx--xxx 15

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