The repetition of relative clauses in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to investigate the repetition of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4; 5 to 6; 0) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The results of a sentence repetition task indicate that Mandarin children with DLD perform significantly worse than both groups of TD children, and they tend to make errors involving the relativizer DE and are more likely to produce Non-RC responses. Furthermore, the gap type of RC or the adjective’s position does not affect our participants’ recall of the test sentences. We conclude that the symmetric performance of our participants in the subject RC and object RC conditions is because the structural intervention occurs in object RCs, but the linear intervention counts more in subject RCs. The syntactic deficit approach better explained the difficulty experienced by children with DLD in RC repetition. Theoretically, this study demonstrates that the Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis captures more characteristics of children with DLD in repeating RCs than previous representational theories.

Acknowledgement

We would like to express our gratitude to everyone who participated in the experiments reported. Additionally, we are deeply indebted to Dai Huilin, Gong Chuanjie, Song Weiqi, Xing Xueming, and Luo Xiaoyan for their assistance in conducting experiments and data collection and to Dr. Ning Chunyan, Dr. Thomas Hun-tak Lee, Dr. He Xiaowei, Dr. Wu Zhuang, the action editor Dr. Huang Yiting, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and advice, which significantly improved this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ EFUH can enable us to explain why children with DLD exhibit a stronger blocking effect than TD children, if we assume that TD children have a less severe impairment. Second, the EFUH can account for the relativizer error, the Non-RC response, and the variation in the severity of grammatical impairment exhibited in children with DLD, as shown in subsequent sections of this study. We will discuss this issue in detail in the subsequent subsection.

² An anonymous reviewer suggests that it should not be speculated that difficulty with SRCs was due to linear intervention given that no length effect was observed particularly for the children with DLD. Before delving into this issue, we must first discern the differences between the linear distance (length) and linear intervention. The linear distance refers to the distance between the filler and gap in RCs, whereas the linear intervention refers to the phenomenon where an NP intervenes linearly between the head NP and the copy in RCs.

We speculate that because the adjective and the head NP belong to two lexical categories, adding one adjective between the filler and gap in SRCRs will not interfere with the establishment of the linear dependency between the filler and gap. However, in SRCs, the object NP and the head NP share a lexical feature, which may prevent children from integrating the relative head noun into the RC.

Although no linear distance effect was observed for the children with DLD, we cannot conclude that there is no effect of linear intervention.

³ It should be noted that the Non-RC response can also be attributed to the linear intervention effect in the SRC condition, as previously discussed.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Henan Province Philosophy and Social Science Project (2022BYY011).