Production of Relative Clauses in Cantonese-Speaking Children with Developmental Language Disorder

Abstract

Objectives: 1. To ascertain whether relative clauses are particularly vulnerable in Cantonese-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorders (DLD) relative to their typically developing age peers 2. To examine the nature of problems posed for Cantonese-speaking children with DLD when producing RCs. Background: Relative clauses (RCs) are among the complex sentences that challenge children with DLD (formerly called Specific Language Impairment (SLI)). Difficulty with RCs is robustly documented in children with DLD/SLI cross-linguistically: there are at least 23 studies published in major international journals since 2000, involving English and 5 other European languages. Cantonese RCs have word order properties that are distinctly rare across languages of the world. Given its special word order properties, Cantonese is an important language in debates regarding acquisition/processing of RCs. Despite its importance, to date there has been no published research on the syntactic competence of RCs in Cantonese children with DLD. Specifically, Cantonese is unusual among SVO languages in placing the RC before the head noun, resulting in processing demands competing in opposite directions: Cantonese subject RCs are arguably less costly to process in light of structurally-oriented constraints like shorter structural filler-gap distance, but more costly in terms of longer linear filler-gap distance and its non-canonical VOS order. As such, structural and linear based processing demands work in opposite directions to both favor and disfavor subject RC processing. For children with DLD having limitations in working memory, resolving such competing processing demands becomes particularly challenging. Method: We used a sentence repetition task (Diessel & Tomasello, 2005) to assess production of a wide range of relativized positions in 40 children (22 DLD; 18 Typically Developing (TD); age-matched; aged 6;6-9;7): Subject(S), Agent(A), Patient(P), Indirect Object(IO), Oblique(OBL) and Genitive(GEN). Additionally, we compared two relativisation strategies: classifier RCs versus RCs with the relative marker ge3. Results: Our preliminary results confirmed that relative clauses are indeed vulnerable in Cantonese-speaking children with DLD. The DLD group was significantly worse than their TD age peers in producing all structure types, except P- RCs. S-RCs were the easiest and GEN- RCs the most challenging to produce for both DLD and TD groups. Unlike English, German and Mandarin, there was lack of a robust Agent over Patient advantage. Ongoing analyses will compare the relativisation strategies and the error patterns in DLD versus TD groups. Discussion: We discuss our findings by considering how factors like general syntactic and semantic complexity and similarity between constructions could affect the production difficulty/ease of RCs in Cantonese-speaking children with DLD. Comparing the two relativisation strategies also allows testing certain structurally-oriented versus processing-based accounts of DLD/SLI, e.g. the Computational Grammatical Complexity account (Van der Lely, 2005) versus the limited processing capacity account (Montgomery & Evans, 2009). Learning Outcome: 1. To identify relative clause production as a vulnerable linguistic feature of Developmental Language Disorders (DLD) in Cantonese 2. To discuss the nature of difficulties posed for Cantonese-speaking children with DLD when producing relative clauses 3. To evaluate how language specific properties affect acquisition outcomes in Cantonese-speaking children with and without Developmental Language Disorders.