Intervention effects in the spontaneous production of relative clauses in (a)typical language development of French children and adolescents

Publication Summary

The present study investigates spontaneous production of 4 groups of typically developing French speaking children (TD6, TD8, TD11, TD14) and a group of French children with specific language impairment (SLI) with focus on the production of types of relative clauses and the occurrence of intervening elements and avoidance strategies. We provide data complementing much of Adriana Belletti’s recent work in that intervention is avoided in the choice of the relative subject, frequently a pronoun and animate, and because we do not find subject relatives with passive. We argue that investigation of spontaneous speech naturally controls for discourse effects and allows to uncover patterns in the feature specifications of relative heads and subjects that are relevant for theoretical descriptions of intervention.