Syntactic intervention on relative clauses: two case studies on italian-speaking children with cochlear implants

This paper deals with the linguistic competence of two children with cochlear implants who showed weaknesses in the comprehension and production of relative clauses. These children were administered a protocol of language intervention based on formal linguistics and were explicitly taught verb argument structure, the Theta criterion, and syntactic movement used to derive relative clauses. Immediately after the intervention and some months later (2 and 5, respectively), the two children showed better comprehension and production of relative clauses. In addition, generalization effects were found. Non-treated structures and narrative skills (tested in one of the children) also improved, and improvement was maintained some months after the end of the treatment.