Assessing children’s syntactic proficiency through a sentence repetition task: A comparison between cochlear implanted children and typically developing children

Cochlear implants (CIs) can provide proper linguistic input to children with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss. However, despite an early diagnosis and intervention, and the development of lexical skills and speech perception similar to typically developing age peers, children with CIs still show a delay in the processing of movement-derived structures. Following previous studies on deaf or hard-of-hearing Hebrew-speaking children, this study provides first data on the repetition of movement-derived syntactically complex structures in Italian-speaking children with CIs. Results showed that children with CIs performed poorer than their typically developing age peers and showed many difficulties in all the structures characterised by a complex derivation. Interestingly, both groups showed difficulties in the production of relative clauses.