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Typical and Impaired Processing in Morphosyntax
Edited by Vincent Torrens
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 64] 2020
► pp. 177–207

A syntactically based treatment of relative clauses

Three case studies of Italian children with cochlear implant

| Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
| University of Padua
| University of Padua
| University of Padua
| Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

In this paper, we describe three case studies of a syntactic intervention given to three Italian-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) to improve proficiency in the production and comprehension of relative clauses, and also their narrative skills. The methodology adopted for the syntactic intervention follows previous studies on aphasic patients with agrammatism and children with developmental language disorders (DLD). Indeed, these studies have shown that an explicit teaching of syntactic rules helps in the recovery and improvement of complex structures derived by syntactic movement. Results showed a general improvement in the production and comprehension of relative clauses, and generalization effects to untrained structures. Moreover, also narrative skills improved. Results were maintained several months after the end of the syntactic intervention.

Keywords: language acquisition, relative clauses, narrative skills, syntactic intervention, hearing loss, cochlear implants
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The acquisition of relative clauses in Italian
  • 3.Treatment of relative clauses
  • 4.Methodology
    • Participants
    • Materials
      • The elicited production task
      • The comprehension task
      • The Frog story
  • 5.Results prior to intervention
    • LB’s performance
    • ES’s performance
    • MM’s performance
  • 6.Explicit intervention of relative clauses in Italian-speaking children with CIs
    • Phase 1: Verb argument structure and Theta criterion
    • Phase 2: Wh-movement
    • Phase 3: Review
  • 7.Results after intervention
    • LB’s performance
    • ES’s performance
    • MM’s performance
    • ES and MM’s improvement of narrative skills
  • 8.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.64.09dor
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