L’uso del test di ripetizione per la valutazione della competenza sintattica del bambino sordo con impianto cocleare

Reduced language inputs due to hearing loss can affect the development of syntactically complex structures derived by syntactic movement. 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 processing movement-derived structures. Following previous studies on deaf or hard-of-hearing Hebrew, and German-speaking children, this study provides first data on the repetition of movement-derived syntactically complex structures in Italian-speaking children with CIs. Indeed, as shown by previous studies, resorting to a sentence repetition task allow to analyse both the participant’s ability in analysing structures derived by movement and their memory skills. It also allows to exclude memory as the cause of misinterpretation of the stimuli. Results showed that children with CIs performed poorer than their typically developing age peers and showed many difficulties in all the structures characterized by a complex derivation. Interestingly, both groups showed several difficulties in the production of oblique prepositional and genitive relative clauses.