Relative clause constructions in children with specific language impairment.

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often exhibit grammatical deficits.
• Research has primarily focused on morphosyntactic issues, with less attention paid to multi-clausal constructions like relative clauses.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the comprehension and production of relative clause constructions in school-aged children with SLI.
• Utilizing a sentence-recall task to assess performance on complex grammatical structures.

Main Methods:

• Compared children with SLI (n=32, mean age 6;10) to two control groups: age-matched typically developing (AM-TD, n=32, mean age 6;11) and younger typically developing (YTD, n=20, mean age 4;9).
• Participants recalled sentences containing relative clauses with varying syntactic roles, attached to different matrix clause types.

Main Results:

• Children with SLI demonstrated significantly more difficulty with relative clauses compared to both control groups.
• Performance patterns indicated that while SLI children found certain relative clause types easier, their overall proficiency was lower than typically developing peers.

Conclusions:

• Seven-year-old children with SLI face considerable challenges with relative clauses, performing below age-matched and even younger typically developing children.
• Factors influencing performance include matrix clause type, the role of the relativized element, and specific lexical choices in object relative clauses.