Development of clitic pronouns in early written productions

Abstract

This study investigates the development, in production, of clitic pronouns in the initial phases of writing by primary school children. Based on a corpus of 272 narrative texts produced by 136 children at the beginning of second grade and at the beginning of third grade, as part of a writing task which integrates the diagnostic instrument of the Preventive Intervention Project for Learning to Read and Write (PIPALE), the written production of clitics in each moment is compared. We conclude that there is development in clitic production between these two moments. The presence of clitics in the children’s written productions, as well as its distribution and function, can, thus, be taken as a developmental marker of competencies of writing composition.