Acquisition of personal and possessive pronouns in children with sensorimotor alalia

Sensorimotor alalia is a type of speech dysontogenesis in children, primarily characterized by impaired receptive speech abilities. Investigating receptive speech disorders in children is of particular importance for both linguistics and interdisciplinary research because it offers new insights into the mechanisms of native language acquisition in normal and pathological development. This article examines the atypical patterns of personal and possessive pronouns acquisition in children with sensorimotor alalia. Such children face many challenges in mastering the pronominal system, especially with the comprehension of the possessive pronouns ego (his), ee (her), and ikh (their), which are homonymous with the personal pronouns on (he), ona (she), and oni (they). These challenges were identified and analyzed using speech samples collected from 36 children with sensorimotor and sensory alalia during habilitation sessions. The longitudinal study of the speech samples was carried out dynamically at the Center for Speech Pathology, Kazan Federal University.