Relative Clauses, Phi Features, and Memory Skills

This 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.