This chapter reports the results of an elicited production experiment run with Italian-speaking children (6;3-10;4 year olds) and a control group of adults. Participants were induced to produce potentially ambiguous Who V DP questions, i.e. questions where a singular verb agrees with either the whelement (subject-extracted questions) or a singular postverbal subject (objectextracted questions). With respect to adults, children employ a wider range of interrogative structures in addition to Who V DP ones, especially in the object condition. This is similar to the findings by Guasti, Branchini, and Arosio's (2012) study of the elicited production of unambiguous wh-questions in younger children (aged 3;11-5;11). We describe similarities and differences found across the two studies, and discuss the nature of the differences emerged between subject and object interrogative sentences and between children and adults. Guasti et al.'s analysis in terms of strength of agreement and interference is adopted to analyze the productions by the children we test. Due to their older age, our children produce two additional types of interrogative structures, namely passive and embedded interrogatives, not attested in Guasti et al.'s results.
We elicited subject and object restrictive relative clauses and subject and object contrastive cleft sentences in Italian-speaking typically developing (TD) children and in a small group of children affected by developmental dyslexia (henceforth DD) or suspected dyslexia (suspDD), i.e. with evident school difficulties reported by their teachers, but without a diagnosis of DD. Our goal was twofold: first, we aimed at comparing TD children with children with DD or suspDD, in order to verify whether and to what extent dyslexia affects the oral production of complex syntactic structures and to find out whether one of the two tested structures is more impaired. Second, we aimed at testing Thompson et al.'s (2003) hierarchy of syntactic complexity, by comparing atypically developing children's behaviour with object relatives and object clefts.To our knowledge, this is the first study comparing the elicited production of restrictive relatives and contrastive clefts in Italian-speaking children with DD. As has already been shown for Italian by Guasti (2013), Zachou et al. (2013) and Guasti et al. (2015), some children with DD present oral deficits similar to children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Therefore, we expect to find a divergent pattern of response in at least some of our children with DD.Results suggest that although dyslexic children exhibit the same general pattern of answers as their aged-matched children, some differences in the production of relative clauses may be observed. The same is not found for cleft sentences. According to Thompson et al.'s (2003) Complexity Account of syntactic Treatment Efficacy in aphasia (CATE), object relatives are the most difficult sentence structures to compute for aphasic patients, followed by object clefts and object wh-questions. Our data show that children with DD follow the same pattern of difficulty.
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