Lone Sundahl Olsen

Annoying Danish relatives: comprehension and production of relative clauses by Danish children with and without SLI.

This study examines the comprehension and production of subject and object relative clauses (SRCs, ORCs) by children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The purpose is to investigate whether relative clauses are problematic for Danish children with SLI and to compare errors with those produced by TD children. Eighteen children with SLI, eighteen TD age-matched (AM) and nine TD language-matched (LM) Danish-speaking children participated in a comprehension and in a production task. All children performed better on the comprehension compared with the production task, as well as on SRCs compared to ORCs and produced various avoidance strategies. In the ORC context, children with SLI produced more reversal errors than the AM children, who opted for passive ORCs. These results are discussed within current theories of SLI and indicate a deficiency with the assignment of thematic roles rather than with the structural make-up of RCs.

A large-scale cross-linguistic investigation of the acquisition of passive

ABSTRACT This cross-linguistic study evaluates children’s understanding of passives in 11 typologically different languages: Catalan, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Lithuanian, and Polish. The study intends to determine whether the reported gaps between the comprehension of active and passive and between short and full passive hold cross-linguistically. The present study offers two major findings. The first is the relative ease in which 5-year-old children across 11 different languages are able to comprehend short passive constructions (compared to the full passive). The second and perhaps the more intriguing finding is the variation seen across the different languages in children’s comprehension of full passive constructions. We argued, based on the present findings, that given the relevant linguistic input (e.g., flexibility in word order and experience with argument reduction), children at the age of 5 are capable of acquiring both the short passive and the full passive. Variation, however, stems from the specific characteristics of each language, and good mastery of passives by the age of 5 is not a universal, cross-linguistically valid milestone in typical language acquisition. Therefore, difficulties with passives (short or full) can be used for identifying SLI at the age of 5 only in those languages in which it has already been mastered by typically developing children.