9. The elicited oral production of Italian restrictive relative clauses and cleft sentences in typically developing children and children with developmental dyslexia

Abstract

We elicited subject and object restrictive relative clauses and subject and object contrastive cleft sentences in Italian-speaking typically developing (TD) children and in a small group of children affected by developmental dyslexia (henceforth DD) or suspected dyslexia (suspDD), i.e. with evident school difficulties reported by their teachers, but without a diagnosis of DD. Our goal was twofold: first, we aimed at comparing TD children with children with DD or suspDD, in order to verify whether and to what extent dyslexia affects the oral production of complex syntactic structures and to find out whether one of the two tested structures is more impaired. Second, we aimed at testing Thompson et al.'s (2003) hierarchy of syntactic complexity, by comparing atypically developing children's behaviour with object relatives and object clefts.To our knowledge, this is the first study comparing the elicited production of restrictive relatives and contrastive clefts in Italian-speaking children with DD. As has already been shown for Italian by Guasti (2013), Zachou et al. (2013) and Guasti et al. (2015), some children with DD present oral deficits similar to children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Therefore, we expect to find a divergent pattern of response in at least some of our children with DD.Results suggest that although dyslexic children exhibit the same general pattern of answers as their aged-matched children, some differences in the production of relative clauses may be observed. The same is not found for cleft sentences. According to Thompson et al.'s (2003) Complexity Account of syntactic Treatment Efficacy in aphasia (CATE), object relatives are the most difficult sentence structures to compute for aphasic patients, followed by object clefts and object wh-questions. Our data show that children with DD follow the same pattern of difficulty.

Language Use and Linguistic Structure: Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2021

“…It is well-grounded that spoken language may be impaired as well. Indeed, as for lexicon and OBLIQUE RELATIVE CLAUSES IN ITALIAN STUDENTS WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA vocabulary, individuals with dyslexia may struggle with lexical information and rapid automatized naming (Jones et al 2016), and they may have difficulties in mastering spoken vocabulary; as for the syntactic domain, children with dyslexia may manifest difficulties in oral comprehension and production of complex syntactic structures, in particular movement-derived constructions such as sentences containing clitic pronouns (Arosio et al 2016;Vender et al 2018), wh-questions (Guasti et al 2015), cleft sentences (Pivi et al 2016), and subject and object relative clauses (Arosio et al 2017;Cardinaletti 2014;Pivi et al 2016). In all these cases, an argument of the verb occupies a position different from the position in which it is interpreted.…”