Not committing has its advantages: facilitating children's comprehension of object filler-gap dependencies is one of them.

Two studies assess French-speaking children's comprehension of object filler-gap dependencies, with the goal of investigating whether the degree of specificity/set-restriction of the fronted object or the intervening subject modulates comprehension. We tease apart the predictions of various accounts attributing children's difficulties to (i) similarities between the object and the intervening subject (Gordon et al., 2001, 2004), particularly when both constituents share a structural +NP feature (Friedmann et al., 2009); (ii) increased processing cost determined by an operation of set-restriction (Goodluck 2010); and (iii) the tendency to incrementally interpret sentences and the subsequent difficulty in revising an early commitment to an agent/subject-first analysis (Trueswell et al., 1999). Our results support the incremental processing view as they reveal that only a less specific fronted object, but not a less specific intervener, enhances comprehension. This suggests that referentially ambiguous objects alleviate children from an erroneous initial interpretive commitment to an agent/subject-first structure.

Training Syntax to Enhance Theory of Mind in Children with ASD.

Preschool children with neurotypical development (ND) trained on sentential complements ("X thinks/says that") improve their Theory of Mind (ToM) performance. Can complementation training also enhance ToM in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)? Thirty-three children with ASD (Mage = 8;11) and 20 younger ND peers (Mage = 4;3) were trained on sentential complements (4-6 weeks, 2-3 times per week, via the DIRE i-Pad App). Pre-training and post-training comparisons show that (1) training boosted both complementation and ToM performance across groups; (2) improvements remained 4-6 weeks after training ended; (3) participants with milder ASD symptoms made most gains. Training on sentential complements thus seems beneficial for addressing ToM difficulties in children with ASD, especially those with milder symptoms.

Multiple wh-interrogatives in child heritage Romanian: On-line comprehension and production.

This study compared the online comprehension and the production of multiple interrogatives in 18 Romanian-English bilingual children aged 6;0-9;2 (MAGE = 8;0) living in the UK who have Romanian as heritage language (L1) and English as majority language (L2) and 32 Romanian monolingual children aged 6;11 to 9;8 (MAGE = 8;3). We examined whether differences emerge between heritage and monolingual children in the online comprehension and in the production of multiple interrogatives in Romanian, which requires fronting of all wh-phrases, contrary to English. The main aim was to uncover to which extent similarities or differences in morphosyntactic properties between the L1 and the L2 systems affect the acquisition and processing of the heritage language/L1. Online comprehension was assessed in a self-paced listening task, while production was assessed using an elicitation task. The results reveal that Romanian heritage children show similar online comprehension patterns to monolingual children for multiple interrogatives in Romanian. A different pattern emerges for production as heritage children produce less complex multiple questions in Romanian and avoid movement of two wh-phrases in all elicited structures. Given that their predominant responses for multiple interrogatives only make use of the structural option present in English, namely one fronted wh-phrase and one in-situ, we take this to show that there is transfer from the majority language to the heritage language. Thus, language production in the children's L1 seems to be affected by properties of the dominant L2, under cross-linguistic influence. Taken together, the results for both comprehension and production suggest that heritage children are able to establish the underlying representation of multiple wh-movement structures, similarly to monolinguals, but have difficulties activating the more complex structure in production.