The impact of early auditory experience for the acquisition of morphosyntactic abilities and working memory

Difficulty in acquiring object clitics (OCs), and the omission of OCs more specifically, is used as a marker of developmental language disorder (DLD) in children learning French. Research also suggests that OCs are a complex morphosyntactic property of French and, as such, they could be particularly taxing for working memory (WM) resources. In light of previous research, it seems more likely that difficulties with OCs could be a marker for atypical early language acquisition. Children receiving a cochlear implant (CI) represent a case of delayed language exposure linked to a lack of early auditory exposure. Few studies have investigated the production of clitics in children with CIs. Studies suggest that children with CIs make significantly more clitic omissions on tasks of clitic production than typically-developing (TD) children. To our knowledge, no study has looked at clitic comprehension in children with CIs learning French or at the relationship between WM and performance on tasks of OCs in this population. The present study aimed at examining the production and comprehension of OCs, as well as the relationship between clitic omission and WM, in both typically-developing monolinguals children and CI recipients learning French. Children with CIs performed significantly lower than the control group on both comprehension and production tasks. Clitic omission was significantly related to WM, but only in the CI group suggesting a differential relationship between early auditory experience, WM, and language acquisition.