The comprehension of double negation in Chinese children with reading difficulties.

This study investigated the processing of double negation in Chinese children with reading difficulties. The comprehension of Mandarin affirmative, single negative and double negative sentences was tested with Chinese young poor readers and typical readers, using a sentence-picture verification task. Results showed that double negative sentences were most difficult to process for both groups; the poor readers performed significantly worse than the typical readers in comprehending double negative sentences, while no difference between the two groups was observed in comprehending affirmative and single negative sentences. Besides, morphological awareness correlated with the comprehension of double negative and single negative sentences in poor readers, while this correlation did not emerge with typical readers. Overall, our results suggest that children with reading difficulties experienced great processing difficulty in double negation, confirming that reading disorders are also characterised by oral language difficulties, in particular in the comprehension of sentences requiring high processing costs.

Mandarin-Italian Dual-Language Children's Comprehension of Head-Final and Head-Initial Relative Clauses.

The acquisition of languages by children using two languages is a matter of debate as many factors contribute to the success of this type of acquisition. We focus on how the competence of dual-language children changes in their two languages as a function of length of exposure and establish whether there are reciprocal influences during language development. We examined the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in a group of 6-year-old (younger) and 8-year-old (older) Mandarin-Italian dual-language children. After 3 years of regular and intensive exposure to Italian, the younger group reached the same level of competence in the comprehension of relative clauses in their two languages, and after 5 years of exposure to Italian, the older group had a better comprehension of relative clauses in Italian than in Mandarin. Acquiring two languages leads to bidirectional influence, beyond a reciprocal support. Finally, some penalty may be observed in the acquisition of subject head-final relative clauses, which is not evident in that of subject head-initial relative clauses.

The Production of Clitic Pronouns: A Study on Bilingual and Monolingual Dyslexic Children.

Clitic production is reported to be challenging for impaired children, suffering from dyslexia or SLI, and for early second language learners too. On the contrary, research has not directly investigated the relation between dyslexia, bilingualism and clitic production. The aim of our study is that of addressing this topic, by analyzing the performance of 4 groups of children in a clitic elicitation task: 25 Italian monolingual dyslexic children (mean age 10;08 years old), 33 Italian monolingual typically developing children (9;99 years old), 25 bilingual dyslexic children with Italian as L2 (10;31 years old) and 31 bilingual typically developing children with Italian as L2 (10;30 years old). As inclusion criteria, bilingual children had at least 5 years of exposure to Italian, including 3 years of consecutive school attendance in Italy. Clitic production was assessed by means of an elicitation task in which the pronoun had to be produced either in the simple present or in the present perfect; higher difficulties were expected in this last condition, in which the clitic has to agree in gender and number with the past participle. Results revealed that dyslexic children, both monolingual and bilingual, performed worse than controls both in the simple present and in the present perfect, indicating that clitic production is challenging in dyslexia. As for the bilingual children, instead, differences were found between the two tasks. In the simple present, bilingual children performed very accurately and similarly to their monolingual peers, indicating that a target performance with clitics is accomplished by typically developing children with a longer exposure to Italian and suggesting that previously reported difficulties were related to linguistic immaturity and are likely to disappear as their L2 exposure and competence grow. In the present perfect, instead, both groups of bilinguals performed worse than their monolingual peers, suggesting that bilingualism could exacerbate the difficulties in the most challenging condition. Importantly, however, no negative effect of bilingualism in clitic production was found once controlling for the subjects' vocabulary, evidencing the importance of lexical competence in the target language for a native-like performance in clitic production.

Chinese Children's Knowledge of Topicalization: Experimental Evidence from a Comprehension Study.

There is a debate as to whether topic structures in Chinese involve A'-movement or result from base-generation of the topic in the left periphery. If Chinese topicalization was derived by movement, under the assumptions of Friedmann et al.'s Relativized Minimality (Lingua 119:67-88, 2009), we would expect children's comprehension of object topicalization (with OSV order) to be worse than their comprehension of subject topicalization (with SVO order). This study examined 146 Mandarin-speaking children from age three to age six by means of a picture-sentence matching task with an appropriate context. The results showed a subject/object asymmetry when the topic marker is overt, and no asymmetry when the topic marker is covert. This suggests that the presence or absence of topic markers play an important role in children's comprehension of topicalization. We propose that both structures involve movement in the adult grammar, but not in the child grammar, at least initially. Sentences without overt topic markers are base-generated on a par with gapless sentences with a topic, and the base-generation analysis is abandoned as soon as children learn the syntax and semantics of topic markers, which function as attractors of topics.

Difficulties in Comprehending Affirmative and Negative Sentences: Evidence From Chinese Children With Reading Difficulties.

Recent experimental results suggest that negation is particularly challenging for children with reading difficulties. This study looks at how young poor readers, speakers of Mandarin Chinese, comprehend affirmative and negative sentences as compared with a group of age-matched typical readers. Forty-four Chinese children were tested with a truth value judgment task. The results reveal that negative sentences were harder to process than affirmative ones, irrespective of the distinction between poor and typical readers. Moreover, poor readers performed worse than typical readers in comprehending sentences, regardless of whether they were affirmative or negative sentences. We interpret the results as (a) confirming the two-step simulation hypothesis, based on the result that the difficulty in processing negation has a general validity (persisting in pragmatically felicitous contexts), and (b) disconfirming that negation, as far as behavioral data are concerned, can be used as a reliable linguistic predictor of reading difficulties.

The acquisition of Chinese relative clauses: contrasting two theoretical approaches.

This study examines the comprehension of relative clauses by Chinese-speaking children, and evaluates the validity of the predictions of the Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 1998, 2000) and the Relativized Minimality approach (Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi, 2009). One hundred and twenty children from three to eight years of age were tested by using a character-sentence matching task. We found a preference for subject relative clauses that persists as children grow older. This preference is predicted by the Relativized Minimality approach, but not by the Dependency Locality Theory. In addition, we observed a fine-grained class of errors in comprehension. We discuss it in the light of the head-final status of Chinese relative clauses.