engleski

Comprehension and production of relative clauses in Croatian school-aged children with specific language impairment

Research on relative clauses may enlighten numerous questions that are more general in the field of syntax acquisition (Hakuta, 1981) since they are proven to be the highest achievement in language development (eg. Kidd and Bavin, 2002). The aim of the present study was to investigate the comprehension and production of relative clauses by Croatian-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI). Children with SLI show numerous difficulties in both comprehension and production of complex syntactic structures (van der Lely, 1996 ; Bishop et al., 2000), mainly with structures that demand syntactic shift in the sentence structure. The participants were 20 children with SLI, and 20 typically developing children age 6 ; 9 – 10 ; 9. Both comprehension and production tasks were used. Comprehension was assessed by a picture selaction task. A preference task (adopted from Novogrodsky and Friedman, 2006) was used to elicit target structures. The results of both tasks indicated that the children with SLI had a significant deficit in the production and comprehension of relative clauses. Difficulties increase with increasing syntactic complexity. The factors contributing the complexity were twofold: the shift in syntactic structure (object to subject and subject to object) and central-embedded position of the relative clause. Third factor, uncanonical word order, is specific for languages with relatively free word order such as Croatian.

language acquisition; spacific language impairment; relative clauses

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