Number Dissimilarity Effects in Object-Initial Sentence Comprehension by German-Speaking Children With Specific Language Impairment

Purpose This study examines the contribution of number morphology to language comprehension abilities among children with specific language impairment (SLI) and age-matched controls. It addresses the question of whether number agreement facilitates the comprehension accuracy of object-initial declarative sentences. According to the predictions of the structural intervention account for German, number agreement should assist the correct interpretation of object-initial sentences. Method This study examines German-speaking children with SLI and a control group of age-matched typically developing children on their sentence comprehension skills for auditory presented subject–verb–object and object–verb–subject (OVS) sentences. The sentences were manipulated with respect to the number properties of the noun phrases (e.g., one plural and one singular, or both singular) and the number agreement of the verb. Results The group of children with SLI demonstrated poorer comprehension accuracy in comparison to controls. Comprehension difficulty was limited to OVS sentences among children with SLI. In addition, children with SLI comprehended OVS sentences in which number agreement (with plural subject and verb inflection) indicated the noncanonical word order more accurately than OVS sentences with two singular noun phrases and therein did not differ from controls. Conclusion The study suggests that number agreement helps alleviate the difficulty with OVS sentences and enhances comprehension accuracy, despite the finding that children with SLI exhibit lower comprehension accuracy and more heterogeneous interindividual differences, relative to controls

Gender Marking and Clitic Pronoun Resolution in Simultaneous Bilingual Children

The acquisition of clitics still remains a highly controversial issue in Greek acquisition literature despite the bulk of studies performed. Object clitics have been shown to be early acquired by monolingual children in terms of production rates, whereas only highly proficient bilingual children achieve target-like performance. Crucially, errors in gender marking are persistent for monolingual and bilingual children even when adult-like production rates are achieved. This study aims to readdress the acquisition of clitics in an innovative way, by entering the variable of gender in an experimental design targeting to assess production and processing by bilingual and monolingual children. Moreover, we examined the role of language proficiency (in terms of general verbal intelligence and syntactic production abilities). The groups had comparable performance in both tasks (in terms of correct responses and error distribution in production and reaction times in comprehension). However, verbal intelligence had an effect on the performance of the monolingual but not of the bilingual group in the production task, and bilingual children were overall slower in the comprehension task. Syntactic production abilities did not have any effect. We argue that gender marking affects clitic processing, and we discuss the implications of our findings for bilingual acquisition

La comprensió de les clàusules de relatiu en catalá infantil

Les clàusules de relatiu han estat objecte d’un nombre important de treballs en el camp de la gramàtica adulta, la gramàtica infantil i l’afàsia. Aquí emprenen el primer estudi de la comprensió de les clàusules de relatiu de subjecte i d’objecte en català infantil. Repliquem un experiment dissenyat per a l’italià per Adani (2008), en concret una tasca d’identificació d’agent, amb 33 nens parlants del català central d’edats compreses entre els 3,5 i els 6,2 anys. L’anàlisi dels resultats indica que els nens assoleixen nivells adults de comprensió de les relatives de subjecte primerencament, mentre que la comprensió de les relatives d’objecte progressa però no assoleix nivells adults fins a l’edat de 5,6 anys. Les relatives d’objecte amb subjecte postverbal majoritàriament s’interpreten de forma errònia com a relatives de subjecte per a tots els grups examinats, en clar contrast amb el comportament adult

La comprensió de les clàusules de relatiu en català infantil

Les clàusules de relatiu han estat objecte d'un nombre important de treballs en el camp de la gramàtica adulta, la gramàtica infantil i l'afàsia. Aquí emprenen el primer estudi de la comprensió de les clàusules de relatiu de subjecte i d'objecte en català infantil. Repliquem un experiment dissenyat per a l'italià per Adani (2008), en concret una tasca d'identificació d'agent, amb 33 nens parlants del català central d'edats compreses entre els 3,5 i els 6,2 anys. L'anàlisi dels resultats indica que els nens assoleixen nivells adults de comprensió de les relatives de subjecte primerencament, mentre que la comprensió de les relatives d'objecte progressa però no assoleix nivells adults fins a l'edat de 5,6 anys. Les relatives d'objecte amb subjecte postverbal majoritàriament s'interpreten de forma errònia com a relatives de subjecte per a tots els grups examinats, en clar contrast amb el comportament adul

Referential Choices and Specific Language Impairment: Sensitivity to Contrast Levels and Grammatical Role

Speakers’ referential choices differ in the degree of explicitness, ranging from very explicit expressions (such as lexical NPs, e.g., the boy) to less explicit expressions (such as pronouns, e.g., he, and null elements). We examine the referential choices of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), in order to differentiate between the linguistic and pragmatic abilities involved in the selection of appropriate referring expressions. Existing findings on referential choices by children with SLI are currently inconsistent and have mainly been reported based on narratives. We used an elicited production task to manipulate the referent’s accessibility by means of two factors: (a) contexts that instantiate different levels of contrast (one vs. two contrasts) and (b) the grammatical role of the expression (subject vs. object). We show that children with SLI and typically developing controls produce more explicit expressions for increased contrast levels and for objects than for subjects. Although children with SLI modify the explicitness of their referring expressions according to the accessibility of referents as typically developing children do, we also find varying production rates between the groups. We discuss how these differences in production rates surface as a consequence of language impairment, although the explicitness of referential choices remains otherwise largely unaffected

La comprensió de les clàusules de relatiu en català infantil

Les clàusules de relatiu han estat objecte d'un nombre important de treballs en el camp de la gramàtica adulta, la gramàtica infantil i l'afàsia. Aquí emprenen el primer estudi de la comprensió de les clàusules de relatiu de subjecte i d'objecte en català infantil. Repliquem un experiment dissenyat per a l'italià per Adani (2008), en concret una tasca d'identificació d'agent, amb 33 nens parlants del català central d'edats compreses entre els 3,5 i els 6,2 anys. L'anàlisi dels resultats indica que els nens assoleixen nivells adults de comprensió de les relatives de subjecte primerencament, mentre que la comprensió de les relatives d'objecte progressa però no assoleix nivells adults fins a l'edat de 5,6 anys. Les relatives d'objecte amb subjecte postverbal majoritàriament s'interpreten de forma errònia com a relatives de subjecte per a tots els grups examinats, en clar contrast amb el comportament adul

Number dissimilarities facilitate the comprehension of relative clauses in children with (Grammatical) Specific Language Impairment*

This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.e., one singular, one plural) on the head noun and the embedded DP. These findings are interpreted in the light of current psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in TD children and provide further insight into the linguistic nature of G-SLI

La comprensió de les clàusules de relatiu en català infantil

Les clàusules de relatiu han estat objecte d’un nombre important de treballs en el camp de la gramàtica adulta, la gramàtica infantil i l’afàsia. Aquí emprenen el primer estudi de la comprensió de les clàusules de relatiu de subjecte i d’objecte en català infantil. Repliquem un experiment dissenyat per a l’italià per Adani (2008), en concret una tasca d’identificació d’agent, amb 33 nens parlants del català central d’edats compreses entre els 3,5 i els 6,2 anys. L’anàlisi dels resultats indica que els nens assoleixen nivells adults de comprensió de les relatives de subjecte primerencament, mentre que la comprensió de les relatives d’objecte progressa però no assoleix nivells adults fins a l’edat de 5,6 anys. Les relatives d’objecte amb subjecte postverbal majoritàriament s’interpreten de forma errònia com a relatives de subjecte per a tots els grups examinats, en clar contrast amb el comportament adult

Reading as a Predictor of Complex Syntax. The Case of Relative Clauses.

BACKGROUND: The current study aims at better characterizing the role of reading skills as a predictor of comprehension of relative clauses. Well-established cross-linguistic evidence shows that children are more accurate in the comprehension of subject-extracted relative clauses in comparison to the object-extracted counterpart. Children with reading difficulties are known to perform less accurately on object relatives at the group level compared to typically developing children. Given that children's performance on reading tasks is shown to shape as a continuum, in the current study we attempted to use reading skills as a continuous variable to predict performance on relative clauses. METHODS: We examined the comprehension of relative clauses in a group of 30 English children (7-11 years) with varying levels of reading skills. Reading skills varied on a large spectrum, from poor readers to very skilled readers, as assessed by the YARC standardized test. The experimental task consisted of a picture-matching task. Children were presented with subject and object relative clauses and they were asked to choose one picture - out of four - that would best represent the sentence they heard. At the same time, we manipulated whether the subject and object nouns were either matching (both singular or both plural) or mismatching (one singular, the other plural) in number. RESULTS: Our analysis of accuracy shows that subject relatives were comprehended more accurately overall than object relatives, that responses to sentences with noun phrases mismatching in number were more accurate overall than the ones with matching noun phrases and that performance improved as a function of reading skills. Within the match subset, while the difference in accuracy between subject and object relatives is large in poor readers, the difference is reduced with better reading skills, almost disappearing in very skilled readers. DISCUSSION: Beside replicating the well-established findings on the subject-object asymmetry, number facilitation in the comprehension of relative clauses, and a better overall performance by skilled readers, these results indicate that strong reading skills may determine a reduction of the processing difficulty associated with the hardest object relative clause condition (i.e., match), causing a reduction of the subject-object asymmetry.De Vincenzi Grant to the first author, Luca Cilibrasi