Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Syntactic Complexity Effects of Russian Relative Clause Sentences in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder. / Rakhlin, Natalia; Kornilov, Sergey A.; Kornilova, Tatiana V.; Grigorenko, Elena L.
In: Language Acquisition, Vol. 23, No. 4, 01.10.2016, p. 333-360.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Syntactic Complexity Effects of Russian Relative Clause Sentences in Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder
AU - Rakhlin, Natalia
AU - Kornilov, Sergey A.
AU - Kornilova, Tatiana V.
AU - Grigorenko, Elena L.
PY - 2016/10/1
Y1 - 2016/10/1
N2 - We investigated relative clause (RC) comprehension in 44 Russian-speaking children with typical language (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD) (M age = 10;67, SD = 2.84) and 22 adults. Flexible word order and morphological case in Russian allowed us to isolate factors that are obscured in English, helping us to identify sources of syntactic complexity and evaluate their roles in RC comprehension by children with typical language and their peers with DLD. We administered a working memory and an RC comprehension (picture-choice) task, which contained subject- and object-gap center-embedded and right-branching RCs. The TD group, but not adults, demonstrated the effects of gap, embedding, and case. Their lower accuracy relative to adults was not fully attributable to differences in working memory. The DLD group displayed lower than TD children overall accuracy, accounted for by their lower working memory scores. While the effect of gap and embedding on their performance was not different from what was found for the TD group, children with DLD exhibited a diminished effect of case, suggesting reduced sensitivity to morphological case markers as processing cues. The implications of these results to theories of syntactic complexity and core deficits in DLD are discussed.
AB - We investigated relative clause (RC) comprehension in 44 Russian-speaking children with typical language (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD) (M age = 10;67, SD = 2.84) and 22 adults. Flexible word order and morphological case in Russian allowed us to isolate factors that are obscured in English, helping us to identify sources of syntactic complexity and evaluate their roles in RC comprehension by children with typical language and their peers with DLD. We administered a working memory and an RC comprehension (picture-choice) task, which contained subject- and object-gap center-embedded and right-branching RCs. The TD group, but not adults, demonstrated the effects of gap, embedding, and case. Their lower accuracy relative to adults was not fully attributable to differences in working memory. The DLD group displayed lower than TD children overall accuracy, accounted for by their lower working memory scores. While the effect of gap and embedding on their performance was not different from what was found for the TD group, children with DLD exhibited a diminished effect of case, suggesting reduced sensitivity to morphological case markers as processing cues. The implications of these results to theories of syntactic complexity and core deficits in DLD are discussed.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84980315610&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/10489223.2016.1179312
DO - 10.1080/10489223.2016.1179312
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84980315610
VL - 23
SP - 333
EP - 360
JO - Language Acquisition
JF - Language Acquisition
SN - 1048-9223
IS - 4
ER -
ID: 62761561