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Part of
L1 Acquisition and L2 Learning: The view from Romance
Edited by Larisa Avram, Anca Sevcenco and Veronica Tomescu
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 65] 2021
► pp. 133–170

Chapter 6
Assessing children’s syntactic proficiency through a sentence repetition task

A comparison between cochlear implanted children and typically developing children

| Ca’Foscari University of Venice
| Ca’Foscari University of Venice

Cochlear implants (CIs) can provide proper linguistic input to children with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss. However, despite an early diagnosis and intervention, and the development of lexical skills and speech perception similar to typically developing age peers, children with CIs still show a delay in the processing of movement-derived structures. Following previous studies on deaf or hard-of-hearing Hebrew-speaking children, this study provides first data on the repetition of movement-derived syntactically complex structures in Italian-speaking children with CIs. Results showed that children with CIs performed poorer than their typically developing age peers and showed many difficulties in all the structures characterised by a complex derivation. Interestingly, both groups showed difficulties in the production of relative clauses.

Keywords: complex syntactic structures, sentence repetition task, children, hearing loss, cochlear implants
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Syntactic properties of the structures analysed
    • 2.1Left dislocated sentences containing a resumptive clitic pronoun
    • 2.2Cleft sentences
    • 2.3Long-distance wh-questions
    • 2.4Oblique and genitive relative clauses
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2The task
    • 3.3Response coding
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Left dislocated sentences containing resumptive clitic pronouns
    • 4.2Cleft sentences
    • 4.3Long distance wh-questions
    • 4.4Relative clauses
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Note
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 17 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.65.06dor
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