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Related Experiment Videos

The acquisition of relative clause comprehension in Hebrew: a study of SLI and normal development.

Naama Friedmann1, Rama Novogrodsky

  • 1School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. naamafr@post.tau.ac.il

Journal of Child Language
|December 23, 2004
PubMed
Summary

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) struggle with object relative clauses, showing comprehension deficits even at age 11. This contrasts with typically developing children who master these complex sentences by age six.

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Child Language Acquisition

Background:

  • Specific language impairment (SLI) affects syntactic development in children.
  • Relative clauses are complex grammatical structures crucial for language development.
  • Understanding sentence structure, especially non-canonical forms, is challenging for children with SLI.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To assess the comprehension of subject- and object-relative clauses in Hebrew-speaking children with syntactic SLI.
  • To compare the performance of children with SLI to younger children with normal language development.
  • To investigate the nature of syntactic deficits in children with SLI, particularly concerning movement-derived structures.

Main Methods:

  • A binary sentence-picture matching task was used to evaluate comprehension.

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  • Participants included 10 Hebrew-speaking school-age children with syntactic SLI and two groups of younger children with typical language development.
  • Comprehension of both subject- and object-relative clauses was tested.

    • Main Results:

    • Children with normal language development comprehended object relatives around age 6;0.
    • Children with syntactic SLI performed at chance level on object relatives even by age 11;0.
    • Four-year-olds with typical development also performed at chance on object relatives.
    • Comprehension of subject relatives was significantly better in the SLI group compared to four-year-olds, and comparable to six-year-olds.

    Conclusions:

    • Syntactic impairment in SLI may involve a selective deficit in processing non-canonical sentences derived by movement.
    • Object relatives pose a significant challenge for children with syntactic SLI, indicating a specific difficulty with complex syntactic structures.
    • Language development trajectories differ significantly between children with and without SLI, particularly in the comprehension of complex grammatical constructions.