The investigation of the comprehension of L1 relative clauses across different languages has shown that subject relatives (SRs) are acquired earlier and responded to more accurately than object relatives (ORs). Most of this work has been based on SVO nominative-absolutive languages. In this article we present the results obtained in a binary picture-sentence matching task from L1 Basque, a highly inflected, ergative-absolutive, SOV language with prenominal relatives. The results obtained reveal that in Basque, ORs are responded to more accurately than SRs, which indicates that children do not comprehend SRs with more accuracy universally. The results are discussed in the light of different hypotheses put forward in the literature in order to account for the previously observed SR preference.
This paper reports on the comprehension of movement-derived structures by a Spanish-Basque bilingual with chronic Broca's aphasia. The study reveals a differential impairment which affects mostly Basque and a selective impairment in this language that affects only object questions and subject relatives. The impairment pattern observed is discussed in light of the predictions made by different representational and processing accounts for (monolingual as well as bilingual) Spanish and Basque agrammatism.The asymmetry observed between the two languages suggests that the patient resorts to language-specific morpho-syntactic cues, which cannot be transferred from one language to the other because of the typological distance between Spanish and Basque. The data confirm results from previous studies showing that (major) typological distance hinders cross-language effects from arising in bilingual aphasia.
This study explores the effect of CLIL on the acquisition of nominal morphology (syntax-morphology interface) and article use (syntax-semantics-discourse-interface), linguistic areas that have been scarcely investigated in CLIL settings. Here we compare article omission and overuse errors in an oral production task performed by L1 Basque-Spanish learners of L3 English in two CLIL and non-CLIL groups matching in age at testing time and amount of exposure. Results indicate that as regards nominal morphology, CLIL and non-CLIL learners are equal in terms of the omission of the definite and the indefinite article, but CLIL learners learn to solve article overuse more quickly than non-CLIL learners. Taking together these results and the findings from our previous study (Martínez-Adrián & Gutiérrez-Mangado, 2015a), which revealed the non-existence of CLIL benefits with respect to the acquisition of verbal morphology, we conclude that while the syntax-morphology interface seems to be unaffected by CLIL, CLIL can aid in the acquisition of features from the syntax-semantics-discourse interface.
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