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The present study investigated the effect of classroom-based syntactic training on children's abilities to produce passive sentences. Thirty-three monolingual English children (mean age 5;2), were involved in passive-voice training based on storytelling sessions within a priming design. The training was delivered in a classroom setting, with two classes randomly allocated to either an active sentence or a passive sentence training structure. All children were individually tested at post-training. Children in the passive condition generated 3.6 more passives than the children in the active voice condition. Pre-training language and memory abilities, as measured by both grammatical level with a standardized sentence comprehension task (TROG-2) and a verbal working memory task (Digit Span), were unrelated to number of passives produced at post training. The study supports and expands recent evidence on the benefit of rich language exposure in the classroom context and on the quick dynamic adaptation of the implicit learning mechanisms to language exposure activities.

Agrammatic aphasia has been widely associated with impairments with functional words and complex sentences. Speech errors of people with aphasia (PWA) have been reported to be selective, with patterns of omissions in functional words, most notably in the domain of tense inflection on verbs compared to agreement in morphologically rich languages. In languages like English, where tense and agreement are hard to disentangle in their inflectional paradigms, investigations of the inflectional domain in PWA are rare. In this study, we introduce a novel approach that allows the disentangling of inflectional errors in English through the patterns of copula omission of the verb to be. The inflectional system of the functional verb to be is richer, and its distribution in the sentence is based on the semantics of its predicate (stage-level vs. individual-level). Spontaneous productions of 16 PWA collated from AphasiaBank transcripts were analysed for violations of tense alongside other patterns of error that could suggest an impairment in the inflectional domain. Copula deletion was found to be modulated by the semantics of the predicate, showing a selective pattern of omission in stage-level predicates. Incorrect case assignment (accusative in place of nominative) was also observed as an indicator of impaired tense. The results confirm the effectiveness of copula to be to investigate the English inflectional system and substantiate previous studies on selective errors in the verbal domain in PWA in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known of the trajectory of grammar in neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) once adulthood and language maturity are reached. Yet, impairments in grammar are reported in children with both communication NDDs, such as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), and other NDDs, including ASD and ADHD. In the present study, we review studies collected in the last ten years on the grammar of adults with NDDs. Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines were applied. Included studies assessed sentence-level grammatical abilities through quantitative experiments on adults with a diagnosis of a developmental disorder. Out of 1550 contributions, 29 were selected. The studies included in the review showed that individuals with NDDs show a language deficit when compared to healthy adults. However, a lack of a unified approach to investigations of grammar prevents comparisons on the nature of the language disorder across NDDs, consequently highlighting the existence of a gap in knowledge. This gap must be filled to the benefit of speech pathologists and, ultimately, their patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agreement is a covariation in morphological form that reflects relations between words. A series of experiments were carried out in Italian during production and comprehension where an element interferes with agreement. The likelihood of interference found in both modalities is related to the markedness of the intervener and to its grammatical nature: it occurs more frequently when the number expressed on a prepositional modifiers intervene between the subject and the verb than the number expressed on an object pronoun. Furthermore, subject agreement process with an intervener object pronoun is prone to error, with many errors reported also in the matched condition and with slower reaction timing in comprehension. The study supports the idea that agreement is a grammatical process sensitive not only to the markedness of the intervener element but also to its structural position. A unifying explanation for agreement in both production and comprehension will be adopted in line with retrieval of an agreement source from a content-addressable memory sensitive to structural positions and their implementation in different languages.

We investigated the production of subject relative clauses (SRc) in Italian pre-school children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and age-matched typically-developing children (TD) controls. In a structural priming paradigm, children described pictures after hearing the experimenter produce a bare noun or an SRc description, as part of a picture matching task. In a sentence repetition task, children repeated SRc. In the priming paradigm, children with SLI produced SRc after hearing the experimenter use SRc with the same or different lexical content; the magnitude of this priming effect was the same as in TDC. However, children with SLI showed a smaller cumulative priming effect than TDC. Children with SLI showed superior SRc performance in picture-matching than in sentence repetition. We propose that children with SLI have an abstract representation of SRc that can be facilitated by prior exposure, but exhibit impaired implicit learning mechanisms.

The paper explores the cognitive mechanisms involved in the verification of sentences with proportional quantifiers (e.g. "More than half of the dots are blue"). The first study shows that the verification of proportional sentences is more demanding than the verification of sentences such as: "There are seven blue and eight yellow dots". The second study reveals that both types of sentences are correlated with memory storage, however, only proportional sentences are associated with the cognitive control. This result suggests that the cognitive mechanism underlying the verification of proportional quantifiers is crucially related to the integration process, in which an individual has to compare in memory the cardinalities of two sets. In the third study we find that the numerical distance between two cardinalities that must be compared significantly influences the verification time and accuracy. The results of our studies are discussed in the broader context of processing complex sentences.

A robust finding from language acquisition, adult processing, and individuals with language impairment is that certain types of Object Relatives (ORs) and Object Questions (OQs) are more challenging in both production and comprehension compared to their Subject counterparts. Approaches informed by linguistic theory have been proposed to clarify the source of the difficulties with these sentences in people with aphasia, with recent models supporting the idea of a grammatically based resource reduction selectively affecting sentences that require the processing of an element acting as an intervener. This work presents new evidence to the study of syntactic competence in people with acquired language disorders, from a pilot study exploring in detail the morphosyntactic competence of an Italian speaker with anomia. The clinical diagnosis of anomia in the participant revealed a deficit in lexical retrieval with no deficit at grammatical level. Morphosyntactic competence was investigated through a series of off-line tasks on both comprehension and production. The morphosyntactic abilities of the participant turned out to be for the most part intact with no difficulties such as agrammatism. However, a selective deficit in the computation of certain ORs and OQs emerged. The deficit was selective for structures with an intervener and more specifically for structures in which the featural specification of the intervening subject is included in the specification of the displaced object. Syntactic asymmetries emerged in the performance of an individual with anomia, with no apparent morphosyntactic impairment or sign of agrammatism. The deficit of the syntactic computation was selective and compatible with the grammatical Featural Relativized Minimality approach to the difficulties in the computation of sentences with an intervener. The preliminary results presented in this work suggest that the analysis of sentences with an intervener may be a sensitive test for the diagnosis of a syntactic-based impairment and that formal linguistic models may offer promising tools for exploring linguistic deficits. Further investigation is necessary to strengthen these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]