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On the Domain Specificity of Intervention Effects in Children’s Comprehension of Relative Clauses and Coordinate Clauses

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New Trends in Language Acquisition Within the Generative Perspective

Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 49))

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Abstract

In this study, linear and hierarchical intervention effects are considered in children’s comprehension of coordinate clauses (CCs) and object relative clauses (ORCs), respectively. It is assumed that intervention effects due to crossing-dependency, generalised minimality or overextension of Relativized Minimality can be domain-specific. The aim of this study is to distinguish these effects from possible interference effects that are not exclusive to the language domain. The pattern of children’s errors of CCs in different tasks is analysed in relation to the pattern of errors of subject RCs, which can be ascribed to recency (in centre-embedding) or to difficulty in identifying the syntactic dependency at stake (in right-branching). Regarding ORCs, a memory task that simulates the demands of these sentences in a non-grammatical context was conducted with children at risk of language impairment in the syntactic domain (syn-LI) and a control group. The results of the analyses suggest the following: age differences and the task demands can favour the effect of domain-general or domain-specific factors; distinguishing grammatical dependencies (CC vs. RC) at the clause-boundary can be a problem in language development; and a small subgroup of children with symptoms of syn-LI is likely to have a memory-independent domain-specific difficulty.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    SLI—Specific Language Impairment. For terminology and criteria for the characterization of this syndrome, see Sect. 11.4.

  2. 2.

    The view that strategic behavior or a single analysis could account for across the board responses prevailed in the early studies of children’s comprehension of RCs (Sheldon 1974, 1977; de Villiers et al. 1979; Tavakolian 1981).

  3. 3.

    A pre-test was conducted in order to evaluate children’s ability to cope with the task. 62% of the 5 year-olds and the totality of the 7-year-olds demonstrated an ability to deal with the test-sentences as linguistic objects.

  4. 4.

    The experiment conducted in Hebrew included CCs and RCs, while that in EP dealt with CCs with intransitive verbs only due to the ambiguity of who-questions (subject or object) with transitive verbs in EP. Who-questions with transitive verbs are not ambiguous in BP.

  5. 5.

    The prominence of an element in a c-command position may reflect syntax-independent processing factors affecting sentence encoding from the point of view of the speaker, insofar as headedness can be viewed as an epiphenomenal by-product of thematic assignment and minimal search (Chomsky 2009).

  6. 6.

    These data were collected in the context of preliminary research directed towards the creation of a battery of tests for the screening of language impairment in BP-speaking children. The comprehension abilities of a total of 205 children from 3 to 7 years were assessed. The sentences included passives, coordinate clauses, coordination in the DP, Wh-questions, RCs, reflexives, and pronominals.

  7. 7.

    The whole procedure was also sensitive to the different demands of each task. The Secret Number Task was the most difficult one. The difference between the mean target responses in this task and in the backward digit recall task (executive control) was highly significant: F(1,36) = 380, p < .000001, SS = 183.08, MSe = 0.48, showing that the former was particularly hard and displayed considerable individual variance.

  8. 8.

    Cf. overlapping areas for verbal WM and language in Fedorenko et al. (2011, 2012).

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Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the contribution of Luiza Frizzo Trugo, a former student, now in a different career, for her ideas on the elaboration of the video-game style material of the Secret Number Task and for her dedicated work in the collection and preliminary analysis of the data obtained in this task. The preliminary analysis of the results was presented at the 13th IASCL Conference (International Association for the Study of Child Language) 2014, Amsterdam, as Corrêa, L. M. S., & Trugo, L. F., ‘Feature interference and WM in the comprehension of object relative clauses by language impaired children’. I also acknowledge the support of FAPERJ (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) for the study of typical and atypical language development and for CNPq (Brazilian National Research Council) for the theoretical research and composition of this chapter.

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  1. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Letícia Maria Sicuro Corrêa

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  1. Department of Spanish, Modern and Classical Philology, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Baleares, Spain

    Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes

  2. Department of Spanish, Modern and Classical Philology, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Baleares, Spain

    Cristina Suárez-Gómez

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Corrêa, L.M.S. (2020). On the Domain Specificity of Intervention Effects in Children’s Comprehension of Relative Clauses and Coordinate Clauses. In: Guijarro-Fuentes, P., Suárez-Gómez, C. (eds) New Trends in Language Acquisition Within the Generative Perspective. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 49. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1932-0_11

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