Comprehension of Relative Clauses vs. Control Structures in SLI and ASD Children

• Autor(es): Martins, Alexandrina ; Santos, Ana Lúcia ; Duarte, Inês
• Data: 2018
• Identificador Persistente: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/34939
• Origem: Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa
• Tipo de Documento: Objeto de conferência
• Idioma: Inglês
• Contribuidor(es): Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto da ULisboa

Descrição

In this paper we investigate the comprehension of relative clauses and control structures in children diagnosed with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Several studies have explored a syntactic deficit in SLI children, and particularly a deficit in comprehension and production of object relative clauses (Friedmann & Novogrodsky, 2004; Novogrodsky & Friedmann, 2006; a.o.), a case in which an intervention effect is created as a result of A-bar moving an object DP which crosses a subject. However, less is known about the performance of SLI children in the comprehension of control structures which may also correspond to a configuration justifying an intervention effect, if control is analysed as A-movement (see Hornstein, 1999). This is the case of subject control with promise-type verbs. In addition, some recent studies suggested similarities between SLI and ASD children in the comprehension and production of relative clauses, but very few recent studies have looked at the performance of ASD children in the case of control structures (Perovic & Janke, 2013 and Janke & Perovic, 2015 are exceptions). In this paper, our aim is twofold: we add to our knowledge of linguistic impairment in SLI and ASD children, by comparing the performance of the two groups in the comprehension of relatives and control structures; we use this comparison to contribute to the discussion concerning the nature of control structures.