The elicited oral production of Italian restrictive relative clauses and cleft sentences in typically developing children and children with developmental dyslexia

We report the findings from an elicited production task carried out with school-aged, Italian-speaking children, eliciting subject (SC) and object (OC) contrastive cleft sentences. These findings are compared with the results from a preference task eliciting relative clauses, run with the same children. We aim at uncovering the strategies employed by Italian-speaking school-aged children and adults when contrasting an agent-subject and a patient-object constituent; in addition, a comparison between the production of cleft and relative clauses is provided within participants. Indeed, by virtue of the syntactic similarities shared by the two constructions, specifically A’ movement of the subject in the subject condition and A’ movement of the object across an embedded subject in the object condition, one would expect participants to perform similarly across the two structures. Children’s accurate performance in the repetition task indicates that Italian-speaking children in their school-age have knowledge of object contrastive cleft sentences. However, OCs were never produced in the elicitation task, differently from SCs.