Comprehension and production of relative clauses: 
a comparison between Swedish impaired and 
unimpaired children

Håkansson, Gisela; Hansson, Kristina

doi:10.1017/s0305000900004128

Cited by 93 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…These results from Hebrew are consistent with previous findings in other languages (Adams, 1990;Berman, 1997;Correa, 1995;de Villiers et al, 1994;Håkansson and Hansson, 2000;McKee et al, 1998;Roth, 1984;Sheldon, 1974;Tavakolian, 1981), indicating a better performance in children of this age range on subject than object relatives. All the participants performed above chancewith subject relatives, but only one third did so with object relatives.…”

Section: Interim Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies

Friedmann

Belletti

Rizzi

2009

Lingua

451

626

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Young children find (some) object relatives much harder to understand than subject relatives. The main finding of this article is that not all object relatives are difficult. The difficulty with object relatives (and object Wh-questions) is selective: it depends on the structural similarity between the A'-moved element and the intervening subject. We interpret this selective effect in terms of a proper extension of Relativized Minimality, the principle of syntactic theory which expresses locality effects linked to intervention, and whose psycholinguistic relevance has been highlighted in Grillo's work on agrammatism. Six experiments have been conducted with 22 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3;7-5;0 to substantiate our claims empirically. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the comprehension of headed subject and object relatives with and without a resumptive pronoun, in sentences with lexically restricted (D NP) subjects. Subject relatives were comprehended well, but the performance on object relatives was at chance. The addition of resumptive pronouns did not improve comprehension. Experiments 3 and 4 manipulated the lexical restriction of the moved element and the intervening subject, using free relatives and impersonal pro subjects, respectively. When the moved constituent and the intervening subject were structurally dissimilar in terms of lexical-NP restriction, the performance significantly improved. Experiment 5 showed a similar comprehension pattern in another type of A' movement: Wh-questions. The comprehension of who and which subject and object questions was difficult only when both the crossing element and the intervener included a lexical NP restriction. Finally, a similar pattern emerged in production: in an elicited production study, children showed a tendency to avoid producing structures in which both the moved element and the intervener are lexically restricted. We conclude suggesting a line of analysis of the difference between children and adults in dealing with object A'-dependencies. #

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Section: Interim Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies

Friedmann

Belletti

Rizzi

2009

Lingua

451

626

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“…3 The authors also noticed that, in the few ORC attempts that they make, children with SLI tend to produce an incorrect (optional) RC marker (wh word or conjunction). The omission of the RC marker in young children with SLI has also been observed in 4-to 6-year-old Swedish speaking children (Håkansson & Hansson 2000) and in 5-year-old Italian speaking children (Contemori & Garraffa 2010). 4 These data have led the authors to suggest that the problems children with SLI have with RCs depend on their inability to build a syntactic tree to its highest node, the CP node, or to lexicalize it with a functional word.…”

Section: Relative Clauses In Children With Slimentioning

confidence: 98%

“…According to one view, the difficulties depend on the inability to build a full-fledged RC syntactic structure to its highest node (Leonard 1995;Håkansson & Hansson 2000;Schuele & Tolbert 2001). This view finds its rationale mainly in production data from spontaneous speech and from elicitation tasks.…”

Section: Relative Clauses In Children With Slimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the aforementioned study with Swedish, Håkansson and Hansson (2000) investigated SRC comprehension and observed that comprehension problems are milder than production difficulties. Contemori and Garraffa (2010) compared RC comprehension and production in their study and found that while children tend to avoid both SRC and ORC production, they have no problems comprehending SRCs, but critical difficulties comprehending ORCs.…”

Section: Relative Clauses In Children With Slimentioning

confidence: 99%

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The comprehension of Italian relative clauses in poor readers and in children with Specific Language Impairment

Arosio

Panzeri

Molteni

et al. 2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and children with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) have problems comprehending relative clauses (RCs) and find object RCs more difficult than subject RCs, as do typically developing children. Few studies have compared these groups directly, leaving it unclear whether the problems observed in children with DD are similar to those described in SLI. Work with typically developing children has shown that the comprehension of passive RCs is less challenging than that of object RCs. It is argued that this asymmetry depends on intervention effects as modelized in a Relativized Minimality framework. Since movement is challenging for children with SLI and those with DD, examining and comparing their comprehension of object RCs and passive RCs can broaden our understanding of their language deficits. In fact, both structures involve movement, but the moved element and the movement configuration are different.In our study we investigated the comprehension of subject RCs, object RCs and passive RCs in 12 Italian monolingual children with SLI (mean age: 7;6), 13 Italian monolingual children with DD (mean age: 10;7) and 50 typically developing controls matched for age, grammar and vocabulary. Results from a picture selection task show that: (i) subject RCs are unproblematic for all children; (ii) object RCs are challenging for children with SLI, children with DD and younger typically developing controls; (iii) passive RCs are better understood than object RCs in all groups, but still problematic for children with SLI and younger typically developing controls. Our data show that intervention effects are found in children with SLI and children with DD and that those with SLI have a deficit in transferring thematic roles to moved elements. Our results point out that some of the children with DD have a mild grammatical deficit that was undetected or escaped standardized tests.

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“…Ha Êkansson, 1997a(cf. Ha Êkansson, , b, 1998Ha Êkansson and Hansson, 2000). The part of the study that will be dealt with here focuses on the occurrence of verb-second and tense morphology in the children's production on two different occasions, with an interval of six months.…”

Section: Summary Of Earlier Research On Swedish Verb-secondmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tense morphology and verb-second in Swedish L1 children, L2 children and children with SLI

Håkansson

2001

Bilingualism

Self Cite

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General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.• You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.Tense morphology and verbsecond in Swedish L1 children, L2 children and children with SLI* GISELA HA Ê KANSSON Lund UniversityThis paper compares the development of tense morphology and verb-second in different learner populations. Three groups of Swedish pre-school children are investigated longitudinally; ten L1 children, ten L2 children and ten children diagnosed with Speci®c Language Impairment (SLI). Data was collected twice, with an interval of six months. The results at Time I reveal a signi®cant difference between normally developing L1 children on the one hand and L2 children and children with SLI on the other. The L1 children use verb-second correctly in topicalized declaratives, whereas both L2 children and children with SLI use structures with the verb in third position (XSV structures) as an intermediate step towards verb-second. There is a clear development between the two data collection sessions for the L2 children and the children with SLI, diminishing the difference between them and the unimpaired L1 children. The similarity that is found between L2 children and children with SLI in this study bears important implications for the discussion of the role of transfer in L2 research and for the question of a defective linguistic representation in SLI research.The acquisition of verb-second in L1 and L2 acquisition has been a matter of debate in the literature on language acquisition for some time. Especially within the UG framework this has been a hot topic, as is witnessed by the large number of journal articles and book volumes that have been devoted to this subject. It has been suggested, and is generally assumed, that this is a case where syntax and morphology interlock, i.e. only ®nite verbs raise to the verb-second position. Interestingly enough, there seems to be a difference between L1 learners and L2 learners in this respect. For example, the acquisition of subject±verb agreement has been found to coincide with the acquisition of verb-second in L1 children but not in L2 acquisition (e.g. Clahsen and Muysken, 1989). Most research has dealt with German (Clahsen and Muysken, 1986, 1989;Eubank, 1992; Meisel and Mu Èller, 1992;Meisel, 1994) but there are also studies on Swedish (Platzack, 1992(Platzack, , 1996. Si...

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Comprehension and production of relative clauses: a comparison between Swedish impaired and unimpaired children

Cited by 93 publications

References 13 publications

Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies

Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies

The comprehension of Italian relative clauses in poor readers and in children with Specific Language Impairment

Tense morphology and verb-second in Swedish L1 children, L2 children and children with SLI

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