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In:Structures, Strategies and Beyond: Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti
Edited by Elisa Di Domenico, Cornelia Hamann and Simona Matteini
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 223] 2015
► pp. 303–320

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Relatively easy relatives

Children with syntactic SLI avoid intervention

Published online: 27 August 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.223.14fri
We tested whether the relativized relatives approach, which suggests that typically-developing children encounter difficulties with movement structures in which one lexically-restricted NP intervenes in the movement of another lexically-restricted NP, also applies to syntactic SLI (SySLI). We assessed the production of subject- and object-relatives in 175 Hebrew-speaking children and adolescents with SySLI and 87 controls. The results indicated that the participants with SySLI avoided intervention, significantly more than the control group, by omitting the relative head or the embedded NP, or substituting them with a non-lexically restricted NP. Two patterns of SySLI emerged: one subgroup could produce subject relatives but was sensitive to intervention, and one subgroup could not produce any relative, possibly due to a tree-construction deficit.
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2023. Relative clause comprehension in Cantonese-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder. PLOS ONE 18:11 ► pp. e0288021 ff. DOI logo
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Thornton, Rosalind, Kelly Rombough, Jasmine Martin & Linda Orton
2016. Negative sentences in children with specific language impairment. First Language 36:3 ► pp. 228 ff. DOI logo
Szterman, Ronit & Naama Friedmann
2014. Relative clause reading in hearing impairment: different profiles of syntactic impairment. Frontiers in Psychology 5 DOI logo

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