5561V - How do Children With Different Communication Disorders Determine the Structure and Meaning of Sentences?

Although child language research has substantially evolved in the last years, investigation on complex syntax is still at its early stages. Different syntactic constructions give us ways of examining how children with various types of language disorders determine the structure and meaning of sentences in general. I will discuss studies that investigated the resolution of ambiguity and syntactic assignment of predicates and reflexives comparing data from children with autism, Down syndrome, primary language impairment, and those who received cochlear implants. I will also discuss how suprasegmental and cognitive aspects affect syntactic processing in these populations.