Cross-linguistic studies have shown that typically developing children have difficulties comprehending non-canonical structures. These findings have been interpreted within the Relativized Minimality (RM) approach, according to which local relations cannot be established between two terms of a dependency if an intervening element possesses similar…

Child gender has been proved to affect toddlers'/children's language development in several studies, but its effect was not found to be stable across different ages or various aspects of language ability. The effect of gender on toddler's, children's and adolescents' language ability was examined in the present meta-analysis of ten Slovenian…

This study examines the comprehension and production of subject and object relative clauses (SRCs, ORCs) by children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The purpose is to investigate whether relative clauses are problematic for Danish children with SLI and to compare errors with those produced by TD…

This article describes the development of new scales for assessing the status of a young child's language comprehension and production. Items and sections on the scales were included to reflect advances in research on language acquisition and impairment. The New Reynell Developmental Language Scales (NRDLS) were trialled on 301 children and then…

In order to study problems of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) with morphosyntax, we investigated twenty high-functioning Greek-speaking children (mean age: 6;11) and twenty age- and language-matched typically developing children on environments that allow or forbid object clitics or their corresponding noun phrase. Children with…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

It was hypothesized that children may experience more difficulty in interpreting "after" than "before" because the sentence typically used in comprehension tasks facilitates dependence on sentence-processing strategies effective with "before" sentences but only partially effective with "after" sentences. For…

Reports two experiments examining the abilities of normal children ages five to seven years and deaf-mute children ages 11 to 18 years in tasks demanding comprehension, production, and imitation of passive-voice and double-negative sentences. (Author/RH)

Supports the hypothesis that children are able to comprehend embedded sentences with semantic constraints at an earlier age than they can understand embedded sentences without such constraints. Subjects were 161 children ranging in age from 5 years to 14 years, 11 months. (Author/RH)

Comprehension of complement clauses embedded into 4 matrix verbs in Greek, equivalent to English in syntactic and semantic constraints, was studied among 32 mildly retarded and 32 nonretarded Greek elementary-level students. Results indicated equal comprehension, but retarded subjects lacked metalinguistic ability. Digit span and verbal…

Nine children suffering from Landau-Kleffner (L-K) syndrome and 25 children with developmental expressive disorders were tested for comprehension of English grammatical structures in spoken, written, and signed language modalities. L-K children demonstrated comprehension problems in all three language modalities and tended to treat language as…

To compare Japanese autistic children's use of semantic knowledge and theory of mind with mentally retarded and typically developing children's, they were tested on their comprehension of active and passive sentences and false belief understanding. Autistic children were sensitive to plausibility levels of semantic bias as were 4-year-olds with…

The comprehension of sentences with "because" or "if" was investigated in children aged 2, 9-11, and 11. (Author/MP)

The question explored is whether native speakers'"simplified" or modified utterances, as in foreigner-talk (FT), actually facilitate comprehension for nonnative speakers hearing such utterances. It is concluded that linguistically more complex input will not necessarily impede comprehension. (49 references) (Author/LB)

Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects aged 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11 years, as well as college students, were asked to interpret utterances consisting of two nouns and a verb in order to determine whether Hebrew speakers can rely on a word order strategy to assign sentence relation. (MP)