Brain and Language 77, 283–293 (2001) doi:10.1006/brln.2000.2402, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on The Italian Determiner System in Normal Acquisition, Specific Language Impairment, and Childhood Aphasia Piero Bottari,* , ² Paola Cipriani,* Anna Maria Chilosi,* and Lucia Pfanner* *Institute of Child Neuropsychiatry, University of Pisa–Scientific Institute ‘‘Stella Maris;’’ and ² University for Foreigners of Perugia Published online March 9, 2001 The paper presents a comparison of the development of the Italian determiner system in three different populations: normally developing children, a child recovering from childhood aphasia from the age of 3 years, 9 months, and 11 specific language impairment (SLI) children. Data from Italian normal children provide evidence for the hypothesis (1) that no prefunctional stage exists as far as the determiner system is concerned and (2) that the syntactic properties of determiners play an essential triggering role early on. The analysis of the determiner system in the aphasic child has a double interest. On the one hand, it may help to shed light on some of the intriguing questions concerning this type of disorder; on the other, it may be relevant for the discussion of the notion of agrammatism. Results of the morphosyntactic analysis reveal that, apart from timing differences, recovery from childhood aphasia shares important features with normal development. Differently from mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched normal controls and the aphasic child, SLI children omit determiners significantly more often than almost any other functional category or free morpheme. We will argue that the reasons for the SLI children’s atypical behavior have to be sought in the nonaccessibility to or in the misappreciation of one fundamental syntactic property of determiners: their role as elements that assign argumenthood to nominal expressions (Szabolcsi, 1987; Longobardi, 1994).  2001 Academic Press INTRODUCTION Traditionally, the terms ‘‘agrammatism’’ and ‘‘telegraphic speech’’ have been con- sidered to refer to a homogeneous category that overrides a set of different speech conditions that deviate from the adult norm. Jacobson’s seminal work embodies this attitude by emphasizing the existence of a number of strict correlations between nor- mal child language and aphasic speech: Perusal of the results from current research may prove challenging for this view, especially within the domain of morphosyntax (a logically possible outcome), if one takes into consideration the different neurological conditions that underline the two linguistic manifestations. That notwithstanding, the question of the parallelism may still be considered an open one as far as the search and the interpretation of linguistic facts are concerned. One of the first aims of the present paper is to explore the extent to which there exists some kind of parallelism in the control of the Italian determiner system in three conditions, namely, normal Address correspondence and reprint requests to Piero Bottari, Institute of Child Neuropsychiatry, Uni- versity of Pisa, Scientific Institute ‘‘Stella Maris,’’ Via dei Giacinti 2, Calambrone 56018, PI, Italy. E- mail: bottari@tin.it. 283 0093-934X/01 $35.00 Copyright  2001 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.