On the comprehension and production of passive sentences and relative clauses by Italian university students with dyslexia

Abstract

This study investigates the comprehension and production of relative clauses and passive sentences by a group of 10 university students with dyslexia in order to check their competence of marked word orders. Comprehension was tested through the oral modality using picture and agent selection tasks, and production was tested using oral elicitation tasks. The results show that relative clauses are comprehended and produced with difficulty, whereas passive sentences are more preserved, particularly as far as comprehension is concerned. The greater difficulty experienced with (object) relative clauses can be attributed to a specific deficit affecting the structures involving A-bar movement and regarding the length of the syntactic dependency, which places a heavy load on the computational system.

Morphosyntactic Skills Influence the Written Decoding Accuracy of Italian Children With and Without Developmental Dyslexia

“…Such an increase was not present in DD children, whose score remained around 80%, and this difference between groups (in fourth grade only) was significant. This is partially consistent with studies arguing for the presence of syntactic deficits in children and adults with DD ( Bishop, 1991 ; Muter and Snowling, 1998 ; Talli et al, 2013 ; Cardinaletti and Volpato, 2015 ), which might depend on the presence of undiagnosed language disorders ( Guasti, 2013 ), or differences in DD profiles of participants. For instance, individuals with deep DD are specifically reported for possible syntactic deficits ( Friedmann and Coltheart, 2018 ).…”

“…Furthermore, anomalous morphosyntactic processing was mediated by lexical cues instead of acoustic salience. Several behavioral studies also report the presence of syntactic deficits in subjects with DD ( Bishop, 1991 ; Muter and Snowling, 1998 ; Talli et al, 2013 ; Cardinaletti and Volpato, 2015 ).…”

“…The possible presence of syntactic deficits in children and adults with DD ( Bishop, 1991 ; Muter and Snowling, 1998 ; Talli et al, 2013 ; Cardinaletti and Volpato, 2015 ; Friedmann and Coltheart, 2018 ) suggests that these deficits might contribute to difficulties in retrieving function words and morphological affixes, which convey morphosyntactic information, during reading. In particular, we wonder whether the three error categories described above (morphological, semantic, and phonological-output-buffer errors) might be influenced by the reader’s morphosyntactic skills.…”

Complex syntax and working memory in children with specific learning difficulties

“…Additionally, crosslinguistic evidence from older children shows that individuals with dyslexia perform poorly on tough constructions, such as relatives and passives, when compared to age-matched controls (see Leikin & Bouskila, 2004 for Hebrew; Talli et al, 2013 for Greek; Bar-Shalom et al, 1993; Robertson & Joanisse, 2010; C. L. Stein et al, 1984 for English; Arosio et al, 2017 and Cardinaletti & Volpato, 2015 for Italian; and Sevcenco et al, 2014 for Romanian). To our knowledge, no research has investigated the possibility that children with dyscalculia demonstrate difficulties in syntax, although it would be reasonable to assume this is the case if dyslexia and dyscalculia share a common deficit in verbal WM.…”

Dyslexia and Pragmatic Skills

“…For this reason, much effort has been put into studying the abilities of people with dyslexia at various levels of the linguistic system, usually in association with other cognitive aspects. Evidence suggests that this specific learning disorder is associated with difficulties in non-word repetition and rapid naming (Melby-Lervåg et al, 2012;Ramus et al, 2013;Snowling, 2000) and impacts structural language skills at large (Arosio et al, 2017;Bishop & McDonald, 2009;Bishop & Snowling 2004;Cantiani et al, 2013;Cardinaletti & Volpato, 2015;Hu et al, 2018;Joanisse et al, 2000). Over the past two decades, other problems have been observed in children and adults with reading disorders, including poor executive functioning (Alteimeier et al, 2008;Baker & Ireland, 2007;Cardillo et al, 2018;Cutting et al, 2009;Ferrara et al, 2020;Horowitz-Kraus, 2014;Kasirer & Mashal, 2017;Locascio et al, 2010;Mashal & Kasirer, 2011;Sesma et al, 2009;Smith-Spark et al, 2016;Whitney et al, 2009), issues in working memory capacity (Baddeley, 1998;Gathercole et al, 1992), processing speed and skill automatization (Nicolson & Fawcett, 2008), vocabulary storage and retrieval (Cappelli, this volume;Cappelli & Noccetti, 2016;Kormos & Smith, 2012;Noccetti, this volume), text comprehension (Bishop, 1997;Ransby & Swanson, 2003;Simmons & Singleton, 2000;Xiao & Ho, 2014), and in the control of attentive resources (Lallier et al, 2009), including orienting ...…”