That-Relatives and Pied-Piping Relatives in Italian-Speaking Children with and without Cochlear Implants: Evidence from a Production Task and a Repetition Task

The aim of this work is to investigate the use of subject (SR), direct object (OR), and oblique (genitive and prepositional) relative clauses in Italian in a group of children with cochlear implants (CI) and a group of hearing chil-dren. Our data have shown that in the production of that-relatives, the NH group performed significantly better than the CI group. The poor performance of the experimental group may be caused by the late exposure to language, although children were promptly diagnosed with hearing loss and are fitted with HA within the first year of age.