1,721,032 research outputs found
On the production of restrictive pied-piping relative clauses in Italian: evidence from populations with typical and atypical language development
Full text linkRestrictive relative clauses are among the most frequently studied structures in language development across different languages and different populations. While much literature is devoted to the acquisition and use of subject and object relatives introduced by that, pied-piping (prepositional and genitive) relatives have been less studied. This paper offers an overview of some recent studies in which these structures were investigated in Italian typically developing (TD) individuals and in individuals with learning difficulties (LD) using the same procedures, namely repetition and/or elicited production. Early studies found that pied-piping relatives are acquired not earlier than 10 years of age. Much subsequent research on Italian found that the rate of production of these structures increases with age increase, but it never reaches ceiling effects. Although percentages increase for both populations, the level of accuracy for individuals with LD is lower than for TD individuals. This is expected, since pied-piping relatives are typical of a formal, written register, to which people with LD have difficult access. However, low frequency in speech cannot be the only explanation for the low rate of production. Syntactic complexity, agreement phenomena, and number of arguments that receive thematic role explains the difficulties with these structures
Verbal working memory resources and comprehension of relative clauses in children with cochlear implants
No full textMemory resources may impact syntax comprehension. Thirteen Italian children with cochlear implants (CI) were assessed in relative clause (RC) comprehension, digit span, and nonword repetition and compared to 13 chronological age peers (CA) and 13 younger controls (LA) with normal hearing (NH). The RC comprehension task tested subject relatives (SR), object relatives with preverbal (OR) and post-verbal subjects (ORp) where number features were manipulated.
Children with CI show worse performance than controls in RC comprehension and nonword repetition. In the RC task, number features facilitated comprehension by children with NH, but not by children with CI. The memory measure that predicted RC comprehension was digit span. In the LA group, backward digit span predicted comprehension of all RC types. Forward digit span predicted comprehension of ORs with number mismatch in the CA group, and comprehension of ORs with number mismatch and ORps in children with CI. In these conditions, high memory resources are needed to exploit number features in theta-role assignment
Relative Clauses, Phi Features, and Memory Skills
Full text linkThis book discusses important issues concerning the comprehension and the production of right-branching subject and object relatives in populations of children, adolescents, and adults with normal hearing and populations of individuals with hearing impairment (children with cochlear implants and LIS signers). Starting from much existing crosslinguistic research on the acquisition of relative clauses in populations with typical and atypical language development, new linguistic tools were developed in order to assess sentences in which number features are manipulated on both the relative head and the embedded DP. This made it possible to investigate how marked features modulate the comprehension and production of relative clauses in the different populations. In comprehension, a typical gradient of difficulty was found for all participants. Subject relatives are easier than object relatives, and object relatives with preverbal subjects are easier than object relatives with postverbal subjects. However, the participants with hearing impairment showed lower scores than normal hearing participants. The asymmetry between subject and object relative clauses was also found in the production task, namely the former were produced more easily than the latter. Different response strategies were adopted when object relatives were targeted; the pattern of response varied according to the linguistic maturation achieved. The performance is explained by attraction phenomena and recent linguistic proposals on locality and agreement. The book contains 5 chapters. Chapter 1 offers a general overview on hearing impairment and the consequences of hearing loss on the acquisition of an oral language. Chapter 2 presents the characteristics of the relative clauses proposed in the comprehension and production tasks. Chapter 3 and chapter 4 focus on the comprehension and the production of relative clauses in the different populations with normal hearing and hearing impairment. Chapter 5 focuses on memory resources and discusses the relationship between memory skills and acquisition of relative clauses
Clitic pronouns and past participle agreement in Italian in three hearing-impaired bilinguals Italian/LIS.
No full textThe aim of this study is to assess the comprehension and to elicit the production of clitic pronouns in sentences with left-dislocation, in three adult hearing impaired bilinguals Italian/LIS and in four hearing speakers of Italian. The occurrence of clitic pronouns and the presence of past participle agreement in Italian are investigated through sentence completion and grammaticality judgement tasks. Results suggest that, in spite of late exposure to the oral language due to hearing impairment, the linguistic competence of the hearing impaired individuals is quite intact and the syntactic information is correctly projected in the syntactic tree. Because of a very selective impairment in the morphology of clitic pronouns, only a qualitative analysis of the errors is possible. The non-standard forms are discussed within the framework of the recent research on Φ-features from a syntactic, morpho-phonological and psycholinguistic point of view. The statistically significant better performance on plural clitic pronouns as opposed to singular ones confirms the findings of previous studies on gender and number features and proves once again that number information is retrieved earlier than gender information
Le conseguenze della sordità nell’accessibilità alla lingua e ai suoi codici
Full text linkThis essay offers a general perspective on the linguistic competence of deaf children
in Italian language. Some studies have investigated the linguistic competence in different typologies
of deaf people: orally-trained children with cochlear implants, native signers, non-native
signers and deaf foreigners adolescents and adults. Although the results vary according to the
different populations, the difficulties that overall deaf individuals experience are the same. They
all make mistakes in unstressed elements (articles, clitic pronouns, prepositions, morphological
functional elements) often co-articulated with the word that follows or precedes them. Deaf people
seem to follow the same phases of language acquisition of hearing people but with atypical
errors that cannot be assimilated to errors foreigners learning Italian language make. In most
cases the written language is the main channel for deaf people to access to oral language, literacy
skills are the final step in the process of language acquisition, while for deaf people these are the
starting point. Is it possible to acquire language through its written form? These remarks lead us
to reflect and reconsider the current school system in an attempt to find appropriate strategies
that better enable deaf people to access the spoken language. This need justifies the presence of
a linguist, specialized in linguistic acquisition and deafness, within the group of professionals who
collaborate in the rehabilitation and education of deaf students
Valutazione delle abilità linguistiche dei bambini con impianto cocleare: uno strumento per indagare la produzione delle frasi relative.
No full textExplicit Teaching of Syntactic Movement in Passive Sentences and Relative Clauses
No full textThis study presents a language learning approach involving the explicit teaching of syntactic movement to a sequential bilingual (Romanian-Italian) child aged 7;4, who was exposed to Italian at the age of 3. The child was assessed on her general skills in Italian and on production and comprehension of relative clauses (RCs) and passive sentences (PSs). Her performance was assessed before and after the teaching period. At the first administration, she had low results in all tests compared to monolingual Italian children. After the period of explicit teaching, improvement was observed especially in PSs. In the use of RCs, improvement was less evident, especially in production, but it is worth noticing that metalinguistic awareness was developed
Resumptive Relatives and Passive Relatives in Italian Cochlear-Implanted and Normal Hearing Children
Full text linkThis study investigates two answering strategies (namely object relatives with resumptive elements and passive relatives) provided by a group of hearing-impaired children using a cochlear implant (CI) and two normal hearing control groups in a production task aimed at eliciting object relatives. in the CI group, we have observed inter-subject variability in the production of ORs (with gap and resumptive elements) and PORs. Indeed, the children who used the former strategy, never (or rarely) used the latter, and vice-versa. In the control groups, ORs decrease with age, while PORs increase, replicating previous results. The higher percentage of PORs as opposed to ORs in some of the CI children is probably linked to the good cognitive and linguistic development attained, which is consistent with their chronological age. Their target use of PORs also shows that CI children have attained a good competence of the passive voice. The use of ORs with resumptive elements (especially resumptive DPs) by some of the CI children is instead a sign of the linguistic delay often associated to hearing impairment. We suggest that they make use of a large spectrum of UG possibilities for a longer period than normal-hearing age peers because it takes more time for them to set the parameters of the target language. They indeed behave like younger hearing children
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