A syntactically based treatment of relative clauses: Three case studies of Italian children with cochlear implant

In this paper, we describe three case studies of a syntactic intervention given to three Italian-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) to improve the production and comprehension of relative clauses, and also their narrative skills. The methodology adopted for the syntactic intervention follows previous studies on aphasic patients with agrammatism and children with developmental language disorders (DLD). Indeed, these studies have shown that an explicit teaching of syntactic rules helps in the recovery and improvement of complex structures derived by syntactic movement. Results showed a general improvement in the production and comprehension of relative clauses, and generalization effects to untrained structures. Moreover, also narrative skills improved. Results were maintained several months after the end of syntactic intervention.