Oblique Relative Clauses in Italian Students with Developmental Dyslexia: Language Assessment and Syntactic Training

This study investigates the linguistic competence of 6 Italian-speaking high-school students with Developmental Dyslexia (DD) in comparison to a group of typically developing age peers. Language assessment was carried out using a sentence repetition task that included different types of complex movement-derived structures (left dislocation sentences with clitic pronouns, long-distance wh-questions, cleft sentences, and oblique relative clauses). Results showed that the group of DD participants performed lower than controls. All DD students were below the mean of the controls in more than one sentence type. In order to improve their linguistic competence, they were administered a syntactic training consisting in teaching explicitly the syntactic rules involved in the derivation of complex sentences, namely relative clauses. Replicating results of previous studies, training proved effective, and the participants showed improvement in the trained relative clauses and in untrained structures (clefts and wh-questions). Improvement was maintained over time.