The production of relative clauses in Italian-speaking children with DLD

Abstract

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have been shown to struggle with the acquisition of complex structures requiring structural embedding and movement of a sentential element from its original position. This study examines the production of subject and object relative clauses (RCs) by Italian children, investigating whether: i) seven-year-old children with DLD are impaired in embedding or movement operations; ii) specific factors, such as animacy of the arguments, affect the production of sentences with movement and embedding, iii) the linguistic profile of children with DLD is qualitatively different from that of typically developing (TD) children. We elicited the production of RCs with animate and inanimate arguments in 12 Italian-speaking children with DLD (mean age = 7;2) and in two TD control groups: age matched (AM) and language matched (LM). Children with DLD produced fewer RCs than either control group and made different errors, showing a slightly different developmental path. Animacy mismatch did not improve RC production in any group. Results suggest that seven-year-old children with DLD are in a transitional stage: they can use embedding but still have difficulties with movement operations, especially in object RCs. This indicates that the language competence of children with DLD improves with age, but long-distance dependencies continue to be challenging.