The subject/object relative clause asymmetry in hearing-impaired children: evidence from a comprehension task.

We investigated the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in hearing-impaired (HI) children using a cochlear implant compared to that of hearing children, by using an agent selection task. We show that HI children performed significantly poorer than their typically-developing peers. Despite their low performance, HI children show nonetheless a typical gradient of difficulty, with subject relatives (OS) easier to comprehend than object relatives with preverbal subject (OO) and these latter are easier than object relatives with postverbal subject (OOp). These asymmetries are explained in terms of some recent minimalist proposals on locality theory and on the fragility of Agreement occurring with postverbal subjects. A correlation between performance on OOp and digit span tasks was found only in the HI group.