Morphological cues in the comprehension of relative clauses by Greek children with specific language impairment and typical development: A comparative study

Abstract

Purpose: This study investigated the effect of morphological case and number marking on the comprehension of relative clauses by Greek children with Specific Language Impairment and Language Age controls.

Method: An agent selection task and experimental materials consisting of 12 subject and 12 object relative clauses were employed. There were two experimental conditions: The first one manipulated number marking for Noun Phrases and the verb (singular vs plural) and neutralised Case through the use of Noun Phrases with neuter gender, which in Greek is ambiguous between Nominative and Accusative. The second one manipulated case and included Noun Phrases marked for morphological case.

Result: The Language Age controls performed better on the comprehension of object relative clauses with case manipulation than on those with number, unlike the children with Specific Language Impairment, who performed at the same level on the comprehension of relative clauses with number and case manipulation.

Conclusion: The children with Specific Language Impairment did not make efficient use of the morphological case cues in object relative clause interpretation. We argue that deficient use of case cues in object relative clause interpretation is due to difficulties in rapid interpretation of case information in these demanding structures.

Keywords::

• Specific Language Impairment (SLI)
• morphology
• syntax

Acknowledgments

We thank all children, who participated in our study, and their parents as well as clinicians and teachers in child language centers and schools in Thessaloniki and Larissa for their collaboration. We also thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor whose comments significantly improved our manuscript.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Supplementary material available online

Supplementary Appendix A to E available online at http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/17549507.2015.1048826.

Notes

^† We adopted this depiction of relative clauses from Friedman's work (Friedmann & Haddad-Hanna, 2014).

^† The critical items in examples always appear in bold. An acronym list is presented in Appendix A available online at http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/17549507.2015.1048826.

^† We performed non-parametric tests for the following matters. First, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test did not indicate normal distribution for participants on all conditions (p < 0.05) (e.g. for controls normal distribution was not found for OO-CASE, OS-CASE and OS while for SLI participants for the condition OO-NUMBER). Second, due to the relatively small samples employed in this study, we preferred to run non-parametric rather than parametric statistics.